


And Your Skin Blooms Purple and Blue

by Zizzani



Series: That Marmoran AU [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Culture, Blade of Marmora Keith (Voltron), Blade of Marmora Lance (Voltron), Cuddling & Snuggling, Culture Shock, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, First Time, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Touch-Starved, blade of OCs whom i LOVE, blade of marmora, lance basically has to go through puberty LATE, lots of blade shenanigans, lots of world building, sexual awakening
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2019-07-29 21:15:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 89,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16272494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zizzani/pseuds/Zizzani
Summary: When Keith leaves the team to join the Blade of Marmora, he quickly resigns himself to the limitations of being the only soldier with human blood. That is, until he discovers he's not.i.e. an AU where Lance was raised by the Blades and ends up meeting Keith along the way.





	1. Red

**Author's Note:**

> Hoooooo boy so I was gonna wait til I finished this to post but I've hit a bit of a wall so here's the first 30k or so. I'm not even halfway through yet so to all of you from the sufferpit who were taking bets as to how long this was gonna be, half of you have already lost.
> 
> I've split this into three chapters so expect more! I'll change the rating as we progress...
> 
> I can't believe I told myself this was gonna be 20k. I was a fool. A damn fool.
> 
> Massive shout out to Ami for basically holding my hand throughout this entire thing and being the best damn beta to ever beta read a fic. And also to Julia, for our support. You're amazing!

_I was just an only child of the universe_

 

_And then I found you_

 

_And then I found you_

 

**

 

“I want you to lead Voltron.”

This wasn’t a conversation Keith wanted to be having right now. Nor is it a conversation Keith wanted to be having at any other time in his life. He would have been happy to marinate in comfortable silence until he and Shiro reached the hidden base that sat tenuously between two black holes.

“I thought you were just delirious with pain,” Keith aimed for joking, but the words come out sounded scratchy and taught. “Why would you make me team leader?”

He had asked the question to be polite, but less than a moment after it falls from his lips, Keith already knew he didn’t care for the answer.

“Because I know what you’re capable of,” Shiro said matter-of-factly. “ _If_ you can learn some self-discipline.”

“Why are we even talking about this? Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“It’s just in case,” Shiro replied. “I need you to get focused.”

His mentor’s old mantra pinged Pavlovian through the back of Keith’s mind;

_Patience yields focus._

Keith resisted the urge to roll his eyes in what he’s sure would be a very impatient display.

This was moot, however, as the sudden rock to the ship rolled Keith’s eyes hard enough for him.

“We’re getting drawn in by one of the black holes,” he voiced the realisation aloud.

“Get us out of here.”

Shiro issued the order with a firm tone and a firmer hold on Keith’s shoulder, and Keith complied on instinct.

Steering the red lion out of the wormhole wasn’t as easy as Keith had hoped for.

Part of Keith’s talent for flying came from instinct. This was what Allura had sensed when he’d first entered the castle ship. For most people, they automatically conflated “instinct” with “impulse”, but that wasn’t it at all. Nor was it certainly a gut feeling that one got in the cataclysm of a moment. For Keith, it came from inherently understanding the limits of the tools at his disposal. When you applied this factor to something like flying, it meant that Keith’s proclivity came from naturally being able to grasp how quickly the ship he was flying could turn a corner, how long it took to reach peak velocity, how far he could push it before it would crumple into metal origami.

Now, he could feel the harsh tug of gravity all the way throughout the ship, and his grip around the joysticks tightened as he drove the mechanical beast to safety. Piloting the red lion indulged Keith with a certain level of liberty on his impulsiveness; he knew he could push her a little bit further without her breaking.

As the gravity finally relinquished it’s hold on the lion, Keith let out a bubble of breath, shoulders slumping.

“Great work!” Shiro exclaimed from his right.

The praise was a little short, however, and Keith couldn’t let the words give him buoyancy beyond the sinking feeling he cradled in his stomach. He wasn’t a superstitious person by nature. Superstitions were myths based on fear and (occasionally) common sense, and Keith was more inclined to make decisions based on the facts he was presented.

Even so, though a minor blip in their otherwise steady course, he couldn’t help but feel that nearly getting sucked into one of the wormholes was a precursor to the successfulness of their trip.

He approached the base still.

The location they had been given sat in glowing binary across the holoscreen in front of them, but beyond the cryptic numbers Keith could see what the supposed headquarters actually looked like.

It was decidedly underwhelming.

There was less of a base to look at, and more of a collection of asteroid chunks, jumbled together in suspended fragments that bared their teeth at each other. The disappointment Keith felt sank down to his very toes.

This base had answers. Answers that he _needed._

The hilt of his dagger dug a little more insistently into his back, as if to remind him of its presence.

Gently, Keith guided the red lion down to the surface of the largest asteroid. Small dust clouds gasped around her claws, fading away into the howl coming from the yawning mouths of the mirrored black holes as she lowered her head.

Shiro stepped out first, Keith following dutifully behind.

Out in the open, the surface of the planet was even less impressive than what the ship’s screen had shown. Keith could turn a full pirouette and see nothing but calloused grey rock and dirt.

The black holes screamed on as Keith turned another circle. They looked like hungry things, wide and toothless throats of oblivion, and Keith could feel them greedily sucking hope out of him like vampires.

“There’s nothing here,” he tried and failed to keep the venom out of his voice. Shiro turned around at the threat of poison. “This place just looks like a plain asteroid.”

The black paladin frowned. “Keith-”

He was cut short by a mechanical whirring a few yards away. Keith head spun around so fast he could hear his neck click uncomfortably.

A small dent appeared in the churned face of the asteroid before splitting into two planes. From the chasm, twin figures arose on a platform, silent as stone and dark as strokes of ink, save for the glowing lilac eyes of their masks. One was spindly, their appearance made more so by the broadness of the other to their side.

Keith’s heart leapt once at their arrival, and the his mind leapt further ahead still as it drew a string between the luminous purple and the exact shade that was carved into the hilt of his dagger. His body made a literal leap, feet nearly tripping over each other to approach, and it would have made a second had it not been for Shiro’s prosthetic hand curling around the crook of his elbow.

“Keith,” he said again, voice low with warning.

The tall figures didn’t speak, but large one did sacrifice their stoicism to make a beckoning gesture with one thickly armoured hand. Keith exchanged a look with Shiro. He nodded a silent assent in return, and together they approached the figures.

The trip down to the base was quiet and tense. Keith could almost feel Shiro’s muscles bunching in anticipation beside him, but he resisted the urge to reach out and place a steadying hand on his mentor’s arm. This was not for lack of care. It was more that Keith’s own muscles were quivering with a different type of tension, and he feared that if he stretched his fingers across the short space between them, they might snap with the strain.

As the elevator doors hissed open, Keith and Shiro were greeted with more cold grey, illuminated in shifting hues of violet and blue. Two parallel rows of masked Galra paved the walk into the base, standing stiff and tall as toy soldiers. The result was intimidating, but Keith supposed that that was the intention, and he refused to allow himself the feeling of being intimidated. Recognising your enemies intent often diminished the fear of attack, even if it did not diminish the likelihood.

Keith’s eyes drifted from the Galra very quickly, drawn by something else.

High above them, almost touching the roughly carved ceiling, was a large purple symbol. It appeared to be made from a hologram, indicated by the threads of static that coughed and looped through it sporadically. Keith couldn’t stop looking at it. It was a symbol he’d been looking at for years, glowing enigmatically on the hilt of his knife. As if sensing kin, the hilt of the dagger shifted in his belt. Keith deliberately didn’t fidget: No good would come from revealing a weapon this early in their meeting.

Obediently, Keith followed Shiro down the walkway towards a figure that stood at the end.

His uniform was different from the others, Keith noted, a clear sign of status. There was something thick and white looping his neck, and he lacked the dark cuirass that the other soldiers wore in favour of a loose tunic.

The figure reminded Keith, for some strange reason, of his first day at Galaxy Garrison.

For their class’s induction, Iverson had stood in front of the year and delivered a speech that was no doubt meant to be rousing and inspiring, but missed the first two rungs up the ladder and had had to settle on perplexing and vaguely boring. He had stood in the same stance, though, chin high, shoulders back, arms tucked neatly at the base of his spine.

Iverson was nothing like this figure that stood before them: Keith could feel the authority rolling off him in waves.

As they approached, he said, “I am Kolivan. Leader of the Blade of Marmora.”

Shiro came to stop a step after Keith. His chin was held high, too. If there was one thing Keith knew about Shiro, it was that he had a talent for following protocol. In this situation, following protocol meant squaring up to the leader of the rebel base as the head of Voltron, Defender of the Universe, and it was a title that Shiro filled as dutifully as he had the title of “commander” back on Earth.

“My name is Shiro,” he spoke in a clear tone. “And this is Keith. We are Paladins of Voltron.”

“I know who you are,” Kolivan replied.

His tone was flat. Keith’s nerves prickled in warning.

“Then you know we were sent by one of your own,” Shiro countered.

Out of the corner of his eye, Keith could see Shiro’s shoulders flex, pulling back a little tighter as if to assert his status.

“Ulaz was a fool to diverge this location to you,” Kolivan extinguished Shiro’s argument with less effort than the breath that came from speaking. “He had a penchant for ignoring others and following his impulses.”

It was impossible to tell with the mask obscuring his face, but Keith felt the familiar and unwelcome itch of having someone’s eyes on you.

“ _That’s_ what got him killed.”

The words felt like a premature reprimand, and had the uncomfortable effect of making Keith feel like he was somehow shrinking in his skin. He resisted the urge to glance down: This was exemplary posturing, and his role in this protocol was not to buckle under the weight of it.

The words brought about a different response from Shiro. The coldness of Kolivan’s tone had the contradictory effect of fuelling Shiro’s temper, and Keith felt the older man tense beside him as it ignited bright as the strike of flint.

“He gave his _life_ to save us!” Shiro barked. Keith could hear the reins he’d put on his voice straining, ready to snap. They were here on a diplomatic cause, after all. “What he did brought us here today, and Voltron is ready to assist you. Are we welcome here or not?”

Kolivan didn’t speak for a moment. The unmoving face of the mask paired with his statuesque form gave the silence an eerie and swollen shape.

When he finally did speak, he stated, “You were told to come unarmed.”

Keith felt his own reins that had been holding back his frustration tear, and the feeling came sparking out of his mouth like a storm.

“You also told us to identify ourselves! The lions are about as close as we come to an ID.”

Shiro was beside him in an instant.

“If anything happens, believe me, you’ll be happy you have the red lion on your side.”

“I imagine we would,” Kolivan spoke calmly. He seemed almost disinterested. “However, I wasn’t referring to your beast.”

The hollow thud of footfall behind him was all the warning Keith got before the large Galra that had greeted them snatched his arm from his side. Keith grunted as it was twisted brutally behind his back, his bones protesting in screaming creaks at the harsh treatment. His feet were kicked out from underneath him, and his ankles screamed as well. Keith was spared the loss of his teeth by the small grace of his helmet’s visor, but that grace did not stretch to his skull, and the accompanying blow that came with having his head smacking into the floor was hard enough to make his eyes roll.

“Keith!” Shiro cried, bounding towards him in an instant.

The smaller Galra from before stepped in front of the black paladin, a clear barricade.

Something else moved, too, Keith noticed from the corner of his eye.

It was another soldier, dressed exactly like the others, dark armour, mask firmly in place, glowing eyes staring owlishly out at him from underneath the low hood they all wore.

But this one was significantly smaller than the rest. They stood a good head and shoulders shorter than Kolivan, though they looked noticeably wiry in their physique. These things alone were not particularly eye catching, which was why Keith had not noticed them upon entering the base. What was eye catching about them was that at the same moment as Shiro, they had taken a step forward.

And at the same moment they had taken a step forward, Kolivan’s hand had twitched from it’s post behind his back, tilting up at the wrist in a small, but nonetheless clear, gesture.

_Wait._

Keith couldn’t move his head enough to look up at them, but his eyes possessed enough movement to swivel in their direction.

The small Galra had stepped back, stature so marblesque it was as if Keith had only imagined them moving.

He could have believed he had, were it not for Kolivan’s hand withdrawing back behind him.

The large Galra pinning him down dug the clawed tips of his fingers against the small of Keith’s back, and the red paladin squirmed weakly at the invasive action. It was only a second later that he realised what the Galra was doing.

“He has one of our blades,” he spat, insulted. Keith’s stomach dropped like lead. “Who did you steal this from?”

Keith rocked his body in a feeble attempt to swipe at the treasured dagger. The furthest he got was planting his free hand on the ground enough to turn his head before the beefy Galra squashed him a little harder. Even so, Keith twisted his neck as far as he could to shoot a steely glare up at his assailant.

“I didn’t!” he growled. “I’ve had it all my life!”

“Lies!” the large Galra insisted. The knee between his shoulder blades rolled painfully over Keith’s vertebrae, and he gritted his teeth to stop his jaws from snapping.

From somewhere above him, Kolivan said cooly, “Can you corroborate your friend’s statement?”

He was talking to Shiro, Keith realised with a quiver of his heart.

“Does this blade truly belong to him?”

Keith looked at Shiro, desperation burning through his eyes as he silently begged his brother to understand. Shiro looked right back, his features tilted in an uneasy cross between confusion and sadness.

When Keith had first joined the Garrison, Shiro had been there to take him under his wing immediately. Keith hadn’t needed hindsight to recognise that his mentor made his tenuous grip on the school’s register just a little more adhesive. Shiro was a legend at the Garrison, the institution’s golden boy and proverbial figurehead of all that mankind could aspire towards. It went without saying that his influence smoothed over that majority of feathers Keith managed to ruffle. A partnership of such warring opposites eventually bred common ground in the form of understanding. Shiro had a talent for reading people, and Keith was no exception. It made his well used and familiar defense mechanisms redundant in the most irritating fashion - Keith could shrug his shoulders and Shiro would see through the nonchalance as easily as glass to spot the frustration below. A jagged word thrown with the intent to harm was caught by the soft cradle of Shiro’s patience. He could decipher Keith’s thought process with a measured look between the two of them, and apply the right tonic accordingly.

Keith prayed for that sort of look now, hoping that Shiro would comprehend his need for secrecy.

“I-” Shiro hesitated, breaking eye contact to look at Kolivan. Keith felt like his lifeline had been severed. “I don’t know.”

The admission was soft, lacking all the blaze from the voice’s earlier temper. Keith could hear the doubt in the spaces between each word, heavy and coarse as rock. He turned to face Shiro, to say out loud what he’d failed to convey with a frantic look.

“Shiro, you know me,” he pleaded. The fear in his voice was unrecognisable, though Keith was fast feeling it form in his gut like a plague. “I promise you I didn’t steal it. I’ve had this knife as long as I can remember.”

“We can’t trust them,” the large Galra cut him off.

The pressure on Keith’s arm increased past the point of painful, and he gasped at the sharp jolt that sparked through the fold in his elbow.

“I’m telling the truth!” Keith cried as he looked up at Kolivan. The desperation in his voice increased in tandem with the pressure on his back. “I saw Ulaz had a knife like this. Tell me what it means!”

Kolivan remained unmoved.

“Our organisation is built on secrecy and trust,” he explained in a grave voice. “You two should leave. Now.”

The small Galra started at that. This time, Kolivan’s hand emerged far enough from behind his back to cross in front of their body, though he did not spare the effort of turning his head to look at them. It was an obvious caution, one Keith recognised as it had been applied to him under other, decidedly less perilous circumstances. The small Blade seemed to withdraw with a concentrated effort.

Keith felt the grip on his arm loosen, and the Herculean weight that had been flattening his spine suddenly elevated. He drew in a shuddering breath that did more to emphasise how he’d been struggling for air than it did actually fill his lungs. He got shakily to his feet, eyes drifting between Kolivan and the smaller Blade.

Shiro neatly side stepped the Galra in front of him, coming to stand by Keith’s side.

“We came here to form an alliance, but obviously we’re not welcome,” he said in a hard voice, before adding, “Come on, Keith. We’re leaving.”

Through knowing each other for years, Shiro and Keith had developed a natural tandem, one that usually only came from kin. It allowed them certain advantages, such as in battle, Keith could strike blindly towards an opponent and know that Shiro had moved safely out of the way, already having anticipated how Keith would move. This symbiosis worked because they knew each other with a care and respect that was only acquired when you strived for it. Shiro had strived for Keith when he’d acted out at the Garrison, and in return Keith had strived to be everything Shiro claimed to see in him.

But this was a part of him that Shiro didn’t know, and so when Shiro pushed, Keith found himself pulling, their synchronicity lost.

“Not without some answers,” Keith bit out.

Shiro stopped in his tracks, turning to Keith with a startled expression. Keith continued regardless: If he was going to pull away, it would be for the breadth of a mile, not for the space of an inch.

“Somehow, one of your knives ended up with me on planet Earth. Tell me how.”

Kolivan didn’t relent. “Your friend is right. It is time for you to go.”

Keith planted his feet firmly. He could feel Shiro at his back, mentally pushing Keith back towards to red lion. At his front stood Kolivan, as immovable and incommunicable as a brick wall. And for once, Keith felt a flicker of doubt as Shiro’s opposing will aligned with that of someone that held all the answers Keith needed. It was a piece of knowledge that slid sideways in Keith’s mind, something not quite lining up between the two objects.

“Where did it come from?” he demanded. “I have to know.”

“You seek knowledge?” the question sounded like a challenge. Keith lifted his chin in an almost Pavlovian response. “There is only one way to attain knowledge here.”

“How? I’ll do it!”

Keith was aware that he didn’t know what he was agreeing to. He was also aware that it was of nearly no importance to him. His priorities had shuffled into a Tetris game and uncovering the truth of his past sat firmly at the top.

“The Trials of Marmora,” Kolivan stated baldly. “Should you survive, you may keep the blade and its secrets will be revealed.

As he spoke, Kolivan took a few steps forward. It seemed as if he was emphasising the gravity of his condition, but from behind him, Keith saw the smaller Blade fidgeting, weight shifting from foot to foot in a way that so far from the uniform stillness of the other soldiers.

“Survive?” Shiro hissed from behind. A firm hand grabbed Keith’s shoulder, spinning him to face his brother. “Keith, this is crazy! If they’re not going to help us, let’s get out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I have to do this.”

Shiro stared at him, lips pressed together firmly. He looked like he was making a discernible effort to hold back his words. They were still in hostile territory, after all. Weakness would be exploited, and they were stronger together. Keith didn’t dwell on the slick irony of being grateful for being at a tactical disadvantage.

“Antok,” Kolivan addressed the large Galra behind them. “Give the boy the blade.”

Keith turned to collect his dagger as Antok held it out for him dutifully. His grip lingered on the blunt edge of it as Keith tugged the hilt.

“We will meet again,” he growled in a low voice.

The look Keith levelled him with was as sharp as his weapon.

“Can’t wait.”

 

**

 

Keith decided he could wait.

His entire body ached with a stiffness like rusted metal. His clavicle throbbed painfully here he’d been struck during the first trial. He could taste the salt metal tang of blood between his teeth, and his vision darkened at the corners as fatigue slapped blinkers on him.

The first trial had bruised him so that Keith’s confidence in his own abilities had been rattled, and each trial after that shook him more until he turned from skill and grasped desperately onto his sheer tenacity instead.

Every time a Blade of Marmora was added to the room, Keith added a new facet of intent and determination, until he was a diamond faced pyre of pure will.

But he wasn’t diamond, he was flesh and bone, and he could have been adding bricks for how much the growing fatigue slowed him down.

 

Keith had been putting his mind over matter, but now his body was giving up, and no amount of blunt force will power was going to overcome that. It didn’t matter how tightly he gripped onto his resolve.

But his blade was still in his hand, the sure weight of the hilt resting between the folds on his knuckles, and that small victory made him grip it a little tighter too.

“Guess I really wasn’t supposed to go through that door,” he chuckled to himself.

The sound warped into a strained cough on the way out of his throat, and the world titled violently as Keith’s legs finally settled the argument of whether or not they should continue their function.

His knees hit the ground first. His head skipped over his body and hit the metal floor with a dull _thunk_ before his torso followed, slumping heavily under its own weight.

Keith’s mind was screaming; _get up get up get UP!_

Keith’s body screamed back with a chorus of unravelling muscles; _stay down stay down stay down!_

His vision swam, darkening at the edges as exhaustion pulled the curtains shut over his consciousness.

Keith blinked once slowly. His eyes only opened enough to take in a blurry silhouette.

“Hey man. You did it.”

The voice was like a cool balm over Keith roaring head. Keith managed to blink his eyes open wide enough to see his friend kneeling next to him, hand outstretched, and his heart soared.

Shiro was here. It was going to be okay.

“Shiro?”

Keith reached out and grasped the offered hand, tighter than he grasped his tenacity, but not quite as tight as he still held his knife.

“Kolivan told me you lasted longer than anyone ever has in those battles,” Shiro voice swelled with enough pride that even Keith’s muscles felt a little less sore. Until he said, “You don’t have to keep this up.”

The queasy wash of confusion that swept through Keith threatened to pull the rug out from underneath him.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

The question was greater than the words suggested, for it was actually three questions in one. Keith wanted to ask _what are you asking me to do?_ And _what’s going to happen?_ But he lacked the breath for all three, and so he tried to imply the latter two questions in the tone of his voice.

It didn’t seem as though Shiro had heard them, though, because he smiled and said, “Just give them the knife and let’s get out of here.”

When Keith had been taken to the home after his father’s death, he knew exactly what people thought of him.

_Orphan._

The label was okay, since they were all orphans. It made him blend in by painting him with a melancholy-dipped brush.

Keith didn’t care for it. He was more than the box they’d filed him into. And he _knew_ he was more, too. He knew he was small and quiet enough to sneak out the home at night via the third floor bathroom window and the rusty drainpipe that was pinned next to it. He knew that he wasn’t strong enough to beat the bullies head on, but he was fast enough to side step their rampages and deliver a brutal jab to the back on the knee.

When Keith had arrived at the Garrison, he knew he was capable of out flying anyone else in his class. So much of his being was composed of things he knew he could do, and things he knew he could not. So when he spoke his next words, Keith understood with piercing and painful clarity that they were true.

“I can’t give it to them, Shiro.”

Shiro scoffed, unimpressed.

“What is it with you and that thing?” he asked, gesturing to the knife Keith’s fingers still held in a chokehold.

The red paladin relinquished his strangling grip to let his eyes roam the looping curve of the glowing symbol across the hilt. It tugged his heart in a sideways motion.

“It’s the only connection I have to my past. It’s my chance to learn who I really am.”

“You know exactly who you are, a Paladin of Voltron,” Shiro snapped. “We’re all the family you need.”

_Need._

The word rang in Keith’s head as clear as a bell.

The echoing reverb was the word _family._

It was true that that was what Voltron had become. Keith hadn’t expected anything to come from showing a group of Garrison cadets and his mentor a collection of random information, and yet here he was in space, millions of miles from Earth, with a team that would protect him with the same ferocity he did them.

What Keith was capable of had slowly transformed into what _they_ were capable of, together.

He no longer needed to fear opponents who were stronger than him, nor step to the side and deliver a strike to the knee, because he knew that someone would be there to watch his back, to do it for him if he missed.

On this team, he wasn’t “orphan”. He was just Keith.

But here’s the thing about being an orphan. The cheap coat of paint that comes with the word sticks like tar. People heard “orphan” and their heads think “tragic”. And their hearts may quiver, but not enough to extend patience and understanding. People heard “orphan” and thought about the life ahead, not the life left behind.

But Keith did. He thought about the father who’d raised him in the desert with calloused hands and a tender heart. He thought about the mother he’d never known and he _ached_ for it.

Because even with Shiro’s kindness smoothing his rough edges, even with this bond with the team, Keith’s heart still _wanted._ It wanted the family he’d left behind, the family that had left him behind.

The disparity between _want_ and _need_ felt so horribly unfair.

“Shiro, you’re like a brother to me…” Keith heard his voice crack. “But I _have_ to do this _._ ”

“No, you don’t. So just give them the knife,” Shiro refuted. He sounded like he was still trying to be reasonable, but the words were clipped and pulled taut.

The was an ache hiding behind Keith’s sternum so furious he had to stop his legs from buckling.

“I can’t do that.”

Shiro’s face dropped, all niceties abandoned. The next words out of his mouth were corrosive, and they stung like acid.

“Just give up the knife, Keith!” he barked. “You’re only thinking of yourself, _as usual!”_

The statement smacked Keith like a freight train.

_Selfish._

It wasn’t a word Keith often thought about himself. But now that he’d heard it, it felt like he was looking at an old worn jacket, one he hadn’t realised how long he’d been wearing.

Was it so selfish to want what others had? Was it really, truly _selfish_ for his chest to squeeze him into breathlessness at the thought of his own?

Keith felt the words tumble from his lips at the same time the realisation tumbled into his mind.

“I’ve made my choice.”

The look Shiro gave him was eleven shades of disappointment and ire and shame.

When he turned his back, Keith felt every hueof it flood his dimming vision.

“Then you’ve chosen to be alone.”

Shiro began walking away. The breadth of his shoulders and back seemed so final, like a brick wall that Keith couldn’t scale. Every step he took further away echoed around the room and in Keith’s delicate heart.

He felt it split down the middle.

One half of his heart stretched outwards towards his brother, fingers splaying wider with every booming footfall. The other pulled back, straining in the opposite direction, towards the Blade of Marmora, towards the answers he craved with feral hunger, towards a family he’d lost.

The knife in his hand felt like a brick of cement, and in an instant, Keith felt it held the exact same value. His body realigned with his mind, and together they drove Keith forward a couple of hasty steps, his hand reaching forward instead of backward.

“Shiro! Wait!”

 

**

 

Growing up out in the desert, Keith would on the very rare occasion wake up to the sound of thunder. Wide loud claps of it would boomerang across the sky, marking the beginning of Monsoon season.

It was Keith’s favourite time of year, and it seemed to come the exact day after the heat and dryness had reached the peak of unbearable and began tipping over into criminal. Him and his father would work out in the sun all day, the heat stripping them of any moisture beyond the grease of their own sweat, leaving them panting like dogs. And then night would fall and the rain would come and coat the land in rivers and lakes. It would pound insistently on the roof of their house, demanding Keith wake up.

And Keith would oblige, because he loved the rains and the way the cracked earth seemed to soak up every drop like it was gasping. There was a small nook in his bedroom that was the perfect size for him to perch and tuck his feet under himself as he watched the fat droplets beat against the window pane.

He loved the rain with such quiet passion that it couldn’t help but love him in return. And so whilst Keith sat up to watch the desert’s swan song, it would sing a lullaby of soft pattering and rumbling thunder just for him, until he slipped back into slumber.

The booms Keith heard now started similarly, coming in frequent bursts with a voice so loud he couldn’t ignore them. But this was not a lullaby. This was a battle cry, and it prodded crudely at the back of his mind as it chanted _Keith, I’m coming._

“Keith, are you okay?”

A pair of strong arms looped under his shoulders, pulling Keith upright.

_Shiro._

Keith gripped his brother’s arm, silently praying to himself _please be real, please be real, please._

The accompanying hand belting around his waist was enough of a response. Keith tried and failed to stop his weight from collapsing into Shiro’s firm hold.

“Stop what you’re doing!”

The order was almost swallowed by crashing noise of rock crumbling, and that in turn was nearly swallowed by the panic Keith felt rising in his throat.

“What are you talking about? The words felt like they were forming on their own, tripping over each other as they fought to exit his mouth. “What’s going on?”

“Call off your beast!” Kolivan snapped.

At the word “beast”, the red lion burrowed into Keith thoughts with a low roar.

_Keith, I’m coming._

“Move out of the way!” Shiro barked back, unwavering. “We’re leaving!’

“You’re not leaving with that blade,” Kolivan snarled as more soldiers flanked his side. “It does not belong to you. You failed to awaken it!”

“What does that _mean?!_ ”

Keith was begging now.

It was almost maddening, to think that the distance between him and the things he wanted to know about his past spanned a couple of yards. They stood right in front of him, taunting and immovable, and Keith wanted to claw his way across the distance and crack them out of Kolivan like he was splitting a coconut.

“Give up the blade,” Antok growled.

It was a command that came with the swift unsheathing of his wide sword, and the large Galra charged at them. Behind him, Keith saw the smaller Blade from before charge too.

Kolivan reached out to wrap one large hand around the Blade’s arm, yanking them back with such force that their feet nearly came out from under them.

Keith mirrored them, stumbling slightly as Shiro shoved him to the side and rushed out to meet Antok head on.

The moment slowed around Keith. Antok blade carved a bleak arc through the air as he swung it above his head. Shiro’s hand glinted with wicked purple light as he balled it into a fist, ready to strike.

To protect Keith.

The image of it slid sideways through Keith’s head. Something about it seemed so inherently wrong.

Shiro had already done so much for him. Shiro, who had given him a future after Keith had stolen his car. Shiro who had given Keith the truth about his illness after Keith had snatched it from the mouths of others.

And here Shiro was, giving Keith his braun and his trust and his friendship, because of something Keith wanted.

Wanted, not _needed._

“Wait!” Keith yelped, all the dawning clarity crushing his voice into a strained squeak.

Antok and Shiro paused where their weapons met to look over at him. The small Blade looked up with a sharp jut of his chin. Keith held out the knife, his grip on it finally slackening. It felt lighter than it had in years.

“Just take the knife! It doesn’t matter where I come from.”

Keith locked eyes with Shiro as he said, “I know who I am.“

Kolivan was silent. Even Antok didn’t speak.

So Keith continued, “We all need to work together to defeat Zarkon. If that means I give up this knife, fine. Take it.”

Patience was a hard lesson for Keith to learn.

It was something that was frustratingly easy to say and even more frustratingly tricky to apply. And since it wasn’t in Keith’s nature, it was a lesson he usually only learnt in hindsight. So it was with bruised ribs and a further bruised ego that Keith held out the small blade.

It felt like such a inconsequential trinket in that moment. One that Keith, as usual, could see in hindsight just how much of his anger and fear and potent grief he’d poured into the knife. For so many years he’d clutched it to his breast with such fervour, as though by doing so he could keep what he knew of his family from slipping away. He’d held on with such force that the hilt had left calluses in the shape of its mantle across his palms, and so Keith’s heart too had grown calluses against the pain that he’d felt so keenly.

But at the end of the day, it wasn’t his family, and it wasn’t the answers he yearned for. It was a knife, and he could relinquish it for the universe.

With a steady hand, Keith extended his arm, the blade sitting loosely between his wearied fingers.

It felt like he’d finally pulled a long worn albatross from around his neck, and the sense of liberty that engulfed him was dizzying.

No sooner had this feeling washed over him than the knife ignited in a blinding light, bathing the roughly cut walls of the room in smooth uniform white. The knife seemed to writhe in his grip, and Keith nearly dropped it out of shock. Kolivan gasped from somewhere in front of him.

“You’ve awoken the blade!”

Keith blinked away the spots in his vision as the glimmering light faded. His knife had grown into something longer, sleeker, glinting wickedly as it curved in a grin. But it was Kolivan’s next words that made Keith’s stomach drop.

“The only way this is possible is if Galra blood runs through your veins.”

Keith nearly dropped the blade a second time, and he curled his fingers tightly around the hilt in anticipation of a third offense.

“How?” he managed.

His voice was tight as a new flood of questions fought over which would leave his mouth first. Kolivan’s arm dropped, and it was only then that Keith realised he’d been restraining the smaller Blade this whole time. When Keith glanced at the shorter soldier, their arms were pulled in tightly by their sides but their posture had slackened like a rope, shoulder curling forwards and chin hanging low.

“There will be time for your questions later,” Kolivan explained. “After your lion ceases attacking our base.”

As if in response, another boom rolled through the room, making the foundations shudder.

Keith said, “Right!” before leaping over a chunk of debris and sprinting towards the exit.

A few of the Blades followed, their long limbs allowing them to keep up with Keith’s pace at ease. The small one wasn’t amongst them.

The red lion was easily quelled, thankfully.

As soon as Keith made it out of the base, arms raised in a placating gesture and Galra stood stationery behind him, the ship resumed its seat on the bald face of the asteroid.

Keith let out a small huff of relief, admissible only by the fact he’d jammed his helmet on in the elevator. It didn’t pair well with his dark suit, but the disparity felt starkly indicative of the differences between Voltron and the Blade of Marmora.

A gentle hand on Keith’s shoulder drew his thoughts away from this juxtaposition, and he turned to look at Shiro regarding him patiently. His paladin armour was tucked under Shiro’s prosthetic arm.

“We should get back to the team,” he said evenly. “They probably know about the red lion attacking. We should let them know we’re okay.”

Keith nodded silently in response. The questions that had choked him lay dormant in his throat, and Keith found himself agonizingly at a loss for what to say.

Shiro didn’t offer to fill his silence, and that in itself spoke volumes. Keith reflected that it could well be that Shiro was choking on his own questions. The inevitability of a “talk” felt like less of a reassurance and more like a guillotine hanging high above Keith’s head.

“I’m coming with you.”

Keith and Shiro turned at the sound of Kolivan’s voice. The tall Galra strode towards them with purpose, glowing eyes of his mask winking out from underneath his shadowy hood.

“It is time the Blade of Marmora builds stronger alliances in the fight against the Galra Empire.”

Shiro lifted his hand from Keith’s shoulder. The blade of the guillotine lifted higher with it.

“Princess Allura will be happy to have you as an ally.”

Kolivan paused on his ascent into the maw of the red lion. His head cocked sideways owlishly.

“Princess Allura? So it’s true she is still alive?”

Keith nodded once, sharp, “Alive and more dedicated to defeating Zarkon than ever before.”

“With good reason,” Kolivan agreed, and he turned on his heel to climb the rest of the way into the ship.

As soon as they were airbourne, Keith opened a comm link to the castle.

The holo screen filled with the faces of their teammates, each wearing a different degree of concern on their faces.

Shiro leaned low over Keith’s shoulder as he said, “Princess! We’re coming back. And we’re bringing someone you should meet.”

 

**

 

After the dimness of the Marmoran base, the lights of the castle ship seemed almost offensively bright.

As Keith stepped down the gangway into the docking bay, he couldn’t help but lift an arm to shield his eyes from the white and teal assault. As his retinas adjusted, he saw the rest of his team waiting with patent agitation for them to approach.

“What’s with the suit?” Pidge asked as Keith stepped towards them. Then after a moment of inspection, “Holy shit, Keith. Are you alright?”

Keith felt alright, but Pidge’s question had just in that moment made him realise that as well as the suit, he was still wearing the testimony of battle. The injuries he’d received from the trials of Marmora were tailored to his skin, a patchwork of purple and black and scarlet scrapes.

But there was too much to say and not enough time to say it, so he simply muttered, “Fine.”

Pidge didn’t seem satisfied with his answer, as her lips pressed together tightly. She also seemed to have come to the conclusion that there were too many questions to ask and not enough time to ask them, so she said nothing at all.

Allura stepped towards them, face set and chin held high. She looked every inch the royalty that she was.

Shiro stepped aside to allow Kolivan to approach her.

His mask warped and dissolved into a mesh of pixels, revealing pale blue skin split with a scar, and a pair of gleaming yellow eyes mounted by parallel red markings. He reached up to pull off his hood as he dropped to one knee in front of Allura.

“Princess Allura, it’s good to see the rumours are true. You’re still alive after all these years.”

Allura regarded him cooly.

“So is Zarkon. Can we consider you our ally in the fight against him?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Allura replied curtly. “Voltron will be at your aid.”

“We don’t have much time,” Kolivan said as he stood. “It would be in your best interest to find a new pilot for the red lion immediately.”

Few sentences hold the power to render a room silent. There’s the kind that delivers bad or shocking news, rendering people speechless out of sudden grief or fear. Some sentences are so bizarre or misplaced that they fail to generate any feedback. And some types of sentences are disarming because they are so unexpected, it takes a few introspective moments for the brain to process them before formulating a response.

Kolivan’s sentence was the latter.

Keith found himself absorbing the words, chewing, and then spitting them back out only to try and absorb them a second time.

Allura seemed to be processing them at a faster rate, since she was the first to ask, “What do you mean?”

“Keith cannot fly the red lion as well as operating within the Blade of Marmora,” Kolivan replied flatly, as if the answer was obvious.

Shiro was the second to recover.

“Of course not. That’s why we need him here.”

Kolivan turned to look at Shiro. His face remained impassive, save for his brows lowering a fraction.

“Keith will be staying with us,” he said evenly.

Shiro stepped forward. He was a solid foot shorter than the head of the Blade in height, but his presence and stature compensated for the difference.

“Keith is a Paladin of Voltron,” Shiro argued. “He is an essential part of the team. We can’t form Voltron without him.”

“Keith is kin,” Kolivan replied.

The sentence itself was spoken as though it was its own explanation. For all of his talk about knowledge, Kolivan seemed less deft at sympathy or explanation, as was evident in the way the team pointed matching frowns in his direction.

But for Keith, what made his heart stumble was the deep and sonorous way Kolivan had said the word ‘kin’. The sharp edge of the _K,_ the lingering rumble with which he landed on the _n_. It resonated with Keith’s heart in a way that felt old and reverent, and he didn’t realise that his mouth was making the shape of the word until he spotted Hunk peering at him curiously. His mouth immediately dropped back into its original poise.

“He’s staying here,” Shiro bit out.

His diplomacy was wearing thin, Keith could see, in the way his shoulders crept up towards his ears and his brow crept down towards his eyes.

“The kit comes with us,” Kolivan rebuffed.

For a second, an old riddle sprang to Keith’s mind. It was one he’d read in school when he was younger.

_What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?_

The riddle had been stamped in crooked and flaking ink, a result of the page being photocopied so many times that the original quality was peeling away from the paper with each generation.

“They cancel each other out,” his teacher had revealed.

The answer had never felt quite right to Keith. It seemed to him that two opposing forces that held such power couldn’t simply equate to nothing upon convening.

He felt now, as Shiro and Kolivan both turned to look at him, that he had found the alternative solution to the riddle.

The energy from such two things would divert and continue in a different direction. Except that Keith felt like a too fragile a conduit for a diversion such as this, when he was met with twin steely stares. He could feel the pressure from both forces squashing him at either end.

“Keith?” Shiro prompted when he said nothing.

“I-”

The single word tripped over Keith’s lips, having finally broken through the barricade of unanswered questions. It felt like the drip feed of water that signalled a dam about to burst. Keith could feel the words straining against each other, pride sliding over shame, arrogance folding over fear. There was so much he wanted to say, and yet it clogged his vocal chords like mud, not one query willing to giving way.

What was it Keith wanted?

It wasn’t the right question.

Keith had been willing to give up his knife in favour of gaining the Blade of Marmora as allies. He knew he was willing to give up more for the safety of the innocent. But these things felt like ego, and with his newfound clarity, Keith wanted to be greater than his own selfishness.

The right question was; where was Keith needed _?_

His eyes ping ponged back and forth between Shiro and Kolivan. Again, he felt himself quiver with the strain of tempering two opposing forces, and they warred inside him like an electric storm.

Keith’s eyes drifted over his teammates.

He didn’t consider himself particularly skilled at reading people. Emotional nuance was an art and Keith believed himself quite colourblind.

As he mets eyes with each person in turn, this felt starkly more apparent. The lift of a single eyebrow from Hunk was a hue between blue and purple Keith couldn’t parse. The downward tilting corners of Pidge’s mouth were muddied shades of grey.

They stood shoulder to shoulder, yellow against green against the blue caps of Allura’s paladin armour. Shiro stood to the side, chest out and shoulders back, still squaring off with Kolivan.

The space between them was exactly the shape of Keith, and his heart arched towards it painfully.

Keith wanted to stay with Shiro, with his team. He wanted to be a part of Voltron and fly the red lion. These were things that Keith knew he could do.

But he was just one person, and he could be replaced.

Kolivan had said that the Blade had spies deep undercover within the ranks of the Galra empire.

They had been fighting this war centuries longer than the paladins that stood in front of Keith now. They had been dismantling Zarkon’s forces from the inside, indirect, discrete, effective.

It was a method that felt so far from Keith’s usual MO that he couldn’t help his curiosity from being piqued. He felt his pride twitch, such it was an eager and fickle thing.

Espionage was something Keith could do, too, he thought.

Thought, but didn’t _know._

It was uncategorized for him, and that provided enough foundation for him to build reason upon.

There was work to be done and people that were needed to do it, and Keith had been working where he was needed since his father had handed him a wrench and steered his shoulders towards a hover bike.

There was more that he could do.

“Keith,” Shiro said again. It wasn’t a question this time.

Keith could hear the blunt edge in his brother’s tone. It was a call, trying to pull him back to the very place he was beginning to pull away from. It tried to wrap around Keith’s shoulders and tug him into the space between Shiro and the others were he was lacking. Keith stayed firmly put.

“I’m staying with the Blade.”

The statement rose from his throat like a wave, cresting over the dam and breaking down the side. Keith could see every droplet of spray hit his teammates.

“What are you talking about?” Shiro demanded.

He looked angry, but it was a look that was wilting at the sides as sadness tugged his expression down.

“Shiro,” Keith started. “Think about it. The Blade of Marmora has intel that we could use. I could be a mediator between the Blade and Voltron.”

Shiro opened his mouth to protest on instinct, paused, and then closed it again slowly. Keith could see the strategic advantages spinning through his mind like cogs.

His silence created a vacuum, and Hunk’s voice was sucked into it as the rest of the team continues to stare appalled at Keith.

“Wait, does this mean you’re leaving Voltron? Does that mean the red lion’s free, because I call dibs- OW!”

Hunk clutched the hollow of his gut where Pidge had harshly elbowed him, her glasses shining dangerously in the bright light of the docking bay.

“He hasn’t left yet and you’re already planning to steal his lion,” she scolded.

Hunk didn’t seem deterred.

“It’s not stealing if he isn’t using it.”

“Dude…”

“I think Keith should stay with the Blade.”

Keith’s head snapped around at the sound of Allura’s voice. She wasn’t looking at him. Rather, she was regarding Shiro with a weighted stare, eyes glittering in an uncharacteristically chilly way.

Allura had been bred for diplomacy since she was born. Her smiles were magnificently tailored, the inflection of her voice was tuned like a piano. She seldom showed an emotion that wasn’t intentional.

As Keith continued to stare at her, he wondered if she was being intentionally cold, though he felt he already knew the answer. The truth of it was harsh as the sting of a whip.

“Allura…” Shiro began.

There was something low in his tone that instinctively made Keith’s hackles raise.

Shiro and Allura shared a lot of similarities. But whereas Allura had been trained to rouse or diffuse a room since birth, Shiro had only been learning since he’d become the poster child for the Galaxy Garrison. His form of diplomacy was tougher and less refined than hers.

Which is how Keith was able to identify exactly what felt so crude about the way Shiro said the princess’s name.

It was a threat.

“Keith isn’t wrong,” Pidge piped up.

Six pairs of eyes turned to look at her, all varying degrees of startled.

There were many advantages to being small, Keith thought. For Pidge, it usually had the uncanny effect of demanding attention. When everyone had to look down to the same level, it often served to equalise stature and nullify posturing. In this instance, it seemed to diffuse the rising tension in a snap.

“With the intel from the Blade, we could design a larger and more long-term battle plan. It would help us develop an actual strategy rather than just waiting for Zarkon’s troops to show up so we can fight them or targeting pocket settlements.”

“We are not alone in this fight,” Kolivan interjected.

His height had a polarising effect to Pidge’s. The pinch in Keith’s neck as he lifted his chin to look up somehow made him feel acutely diminished.

“There is a rebellion that has been fighting as long as the Blade. If you can find them and seek them out, I’m sure you will be able to form a strong alliance. There will be many worthy candidates for the position of Red Paladin.”

“Hey, I already called dibs!” Hunk protested.

His outburst lasted as long as it took for Pidge to deliver another swift elbow to his ribs.

“Keith,” Shiro spoke again. The danger in his voice had rounded out into something softer and more malleable. “It’s your decision.”

“I want-” Keith started. But that was wrong. It wasn’t about what he wanted, so he tried again. “I think… I could make a real difference with the Blade. We can reach more people this way.”

Shiro regarded him heavily, eyes dark as an approaching storm.

His silence was disarming. The rest of the speech in the team seemed to lapse into dormancy as everyone waited for their leader to speak. Keith didn’t break eye contact with his brother.

Shiro could read him like a book, and so Keith poured every ounce of his thoughts and emotions into an infuriatingly level stare, hoping beyond hope that Shiro would understand.

The black paladin didn’t relinquish the gag he’d inadvertently put on the room, but he did step forward. Keith forced himself to stand his ground.

His feet stayed planted on the sleek metal floor as Shiro strode towards him. Keith remained rooted to the spot right up until Shiro clapped one hand on his shoulder and dragged him into a crushing embrace.

Keith tensed automatically. The hug was a little too tight to be one of camaraderie, and he could see the team over Shiro’s shoulder exchanging uncomfortable glances at each other.

It was only when Shiro turned his head to speak into Keith’s ear did he feel his muscles loosen like a cord.

“Okay,” Shiro murmured. The words were soothing balm to the ragged wounds of Keith’s emotions. “Okay.”

He released Keith’s body just enough to pull back and look him in the eye, but one hand remained firmly planted on Keith’s shoulder, a life line to follow back should he need it.

“Be safe,” Shiro said, louder this time.

He turned to fix Kolivan with a stern look. “Keep him safe.”

The tall Galra bowed his head once, face solemn. “You have my word.”

“Oh, I’ve gotta get in on this!” Hunk announced from nearby.

Keith was immediately forced back into Shiro by a pair of thick arms encircling his waist. Hunk made a happy whine somewhere in his chest as he squeezed to two of them together, the enthusiasm of it enough to lift Keith’s heels off the floor and the air from his lungs. A smaller pair of arms wrapped around Keith’s middle as Pidge joined the fray.

Her size demanded their attention, and Hunk uncurled one arm to tuck her into the embrace as well.

There was an insistent smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, and it didn’t take much for Keith to release it. His chest felt round and full with the warmth that surrounded him, and it spilled over to pull his smile up a little brighter. Keith wiggled his fingers as much as he could manage to return the embrace.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving,” Pidge mumbled, her face buried tactically into Keith’s bicep.

He couldn’t help but be a little grateful that Hunk was holding them so tight: The warped strain in Pidge’s voice made it sound like she was dangerously close to tears, and for her, sadness tended to adopt the form of violence.

Keith didn’t think he could get closer to his team as his cheek was crushed uncomfortably against Shiro’s breastplate. That was, until Coran somehow managed to pick all four of them up in his arms, his head tilted back as his mouth opened wide with a wail.

“We’ll miss you, Keith!” he cried as fat teardrops escaped from under his eyelids.

Keith was too stunned to reply. He often forgot just how strong Alteans were, and the fact that his feet were dangling a few inches off the floor was stilting his brain so much that recalling this memory was difficult.

He was saved the trouble by Coran promptly plopping them back down on the floor and excusing himself dramatically to get a hankerchief.

“I’ll miss you too,” he said, turning to each one of his teammates.

His eyes finally settled on Allura.

She was standing a little way off, hands firmly by her sides. Her body was tilted, as if she’d taken a step forward automatically but had decided to abort the path over midway. As she locked eyes with Keith, her lips parted in preparation to speak. This too was aborted. Allura pressed her lips together harshly, cutting off any farewell that had been about to bud, and looked away from their small assembly.

The swell in Keith’s chest deflated a little.

He was kept from floating adrift by Shiro’s hand still on his shoulder.

His brother stood tall, shoulders back, chin up, like a good soldier. When he addressed Keith, he was all business, signalling the end of the tender moment.

“Stay in touch,” he commanded. “I want weekly reports of your findings.”

Kolivan stepped forward, no doubt inspired by the formal timbre Shiro’s voice had taken on. It seemed that opposing forces beckoned each other.

He said, “We will be in contact, Black Paladin.”

Keith couldn’t help but stand a little taller, too. Years of military training had drilled into him that you stood to attention when a ranking officer was addressing you, and the two leaders before him were as high ranking as they came.

“Keith,” Kolivan turned towards him.

Keith’s heels twitched towards each other, drilled to obedience.

“Let us take leave.”

Keith didn’t salute, but his fingers flickered slightly where they swung haplessly at his side. Instead, he bowed his head in silent acknowledgement and followed Kolivan towards the Marmoran ship at the back of the red lion.

The rest of the team traipsed after him, quiet as a funeral march.

Hunk and Pidge tittered at each other, alternating between mumbling between themselves and shadowing Keith’s sides. They felt like two constants alongside him, both whirring with flapping hands and staccato speech like twin engines. It was a welcome buzz that made Keith feel warm and wanted. Hunk’s hand kept pressing against his bicep in rhythmic affection. Pidge grasped his hand, squeezed once hard, then let go, her shining eyes cast away.

When Keith turned his head, he spied Allura behind their shambling train. She was a few steps behind, the distance so measured it was hard not to see it as deliberate. Her eyes were in a far off place, opaque and stormy, their usual glittering hues dulled with thoughts.

As if sensing his eyes on her, Allura suddenly snapped her attention up to Keith’s inquisitive gaze.

Keith didn’t know the princess like he knew Shiro. He couldn’t communicate with her through expression alone. Even so, it was hard not decipher the stoniness in her eyes, sparking like flint as she absorbed the image of him. She looked down, mouth twisting into a shape like she’d tasted something bitter.

Keith’s heart sank.

Shiro clapped a hand on his shoulder, drawing his attention. It felt like the fall of a gavel, as Keith was sentenced to exile or community service or whichever of the two felt more final.

“There will always be a place for you with Voltron.”

Keith could practically see the words crest through the air, curling upwards before they landed on him. He felt every syllable all the way through to his bones, and the hand Shiro left planted on his shoulder felt like it stayed there even when the older man’s fingers slipped away, a phantom weight that held the words in Keith’s mind.

He offered Shiro a private smile and the team a public wave before he turned and stepped onto the Marmoran craft.

As the ship sped away from the castle, Keith watched it from out the window. The white peaks shrunk into the distance, so small that Keith could hold up his thumb and measure the size of it in relation to his knuckles. It made it feel as though he could reach out and grab the whole ship in his hand, if he wanted to.

Keith’s hands stayed in his lap.

 

**

 

The elevator down to the base had been thick and silent with tension when Shiro and Keith had first arrived. The filtering light that gasped through the doors had felt like prison bars.

Now, as Keith stood next to Kolivan, his back flanked by two faceless Marmoran soldiers, the lights felt like sunlight winking over the horizon, signalling the dawning of a new day.

“You’ll begin training in the morning,” Kolivan explained to him curtly. “I will assign you a mentor for basic combat.”

His voice was clipping, direct, concise. He wasn’t someone of few words, but he was efficient with his speech, never belabouring a point, never elusive with his explanations.

“Basic combat?” Keith queried.

Kolivan shot him a withering look. “You are woefully underskilled, kit. If we sent you on a mission now, you’d be dead within a movement.”

Keith wanted to take offense to the observation, but his wounds from the earlier trials kicked out a particularly obnoxious throb, and the argument died on Keith’s tongue.

“You will also be sent to undergo a full physical as protocol.”

Keith inclined his head at that. “What good will that do? I barely have any Galra traits.”

Kolivan was unperturbed. “If you do, then they will reveal themselves during the physical.”

Keith’s head righted itself, and he remained quiet the rest of the ride down the elevator shaft. As the doors hissed open, he followed Kolivan through them, back into the reception hall of the Galra base. Two more Blade soldiers were stood waiting for them, arms folded neatly behind their backs.

From what Keith had seen, it seemed as though the Marmoran base preferred to present itself in pairs: Twin doors bracketed the small ledge underneath the flickering violet sigil of Marmora. The Blades themselves he’d only seen appear in parallel sets, either side by side or face to face, a clear balance and order to their direction. It gave Keith the distinct feeling of going slightly cross-eyed as his gaze was inadvertently drawn to the space between these things.

He shook his head with a hard blink to try and free himself of the sensation. The fatigue was getting to him.

When he opened his eyes, a blur of something caught his attention at the edge of his vision. Keith turned his head to catch it, but was greeted only with the worn texture of grey rock and shrapnel.

Kolivan had stopped walking, he realised a beat too late. Keith slowed his pace to wait obediently, but Kolivan was staring at something to the side, in the very place Keith had just been looking.

“Kolivan?” he prompted.

The Marmoran leader turned his head to look down at him. Keith instantly felt more aware of his lacking height.

“This is Eshka and Orok,” Kolivan said as he gestured to the two Galra standing to attention. “They will give you a tour of the base and show you to your barracks.”

But Kolivan wasn’t looking at any of them as he spoke. His focus had been pulled sideways, back towards to corner of the room, and his mouth had been pulled sideways as well, into a difficult expression.

Before Keith could open his mouth to ask, Kolivan said, “If you would excuse me. I have something to attend to.”

He turned on a dime, striding away from the triad and off towards where he’d been looking. The sharp wings of his shoulder felt like an echo of Shiro’s, broad as the stern of a ship. Keith stared after him.

It struck him then just how out of place he was. The presence that Shiro and Kolivan had supplied when entering the base felt that much more prevalent now that it was gone. It was as though someone had snatched a crutch from under Keith’s arm. Kolivan had been providing him a lifeline under the form of familiarity, and now that Keith stood alone with two utter strangers it was as though he’d been cut adrift, left to float haplessly through a place he didn’t recognise.  He turned towards the two Blades with a sudden hollow feeling.

The facelessness of the masks was eerie, glowing disc eyes staring back at him in a owlish and unfriendly way.

The feeling of dread had roughly three ticks to bloom before one of the Blades masks warped and vanished.

“So you’re the new recruit, huh?” the Blade said, stepping forward.

He pushed his hood back as he spoke to reveal two glinting golden eyes and a pair of tall ears that shot out of his head like church spires. His face was chipped with a mosaic of small scratches and dents, a sculpture of battles past.

He was tall, even for a Galra, but his body was wiry and lean in a way that made it look as if he’d been stretched.

“I am Orok,” he announced, extending his hand.

Keith extended his in return, Earth custom preparing him for a solid grip around his fingers.

Orok moved forward with Galra custom, grasping Keith firmly by the forearm in a singular gesture instead.

“You’re small for a Galra,” he observed.

“I’m half human,” Keith retorted, his grip on Orok’s arm tightening a fraction.

The gesture had the inverse effect of what he’d hoped. The intention had been defensive, but Orok seemed delighted at the spark of fight, his golden eyes catching the light in a way that looked vaguely maniacal.

“Which half?” he pressed, gripping Keith’s arm tighter in reciprocation.

“Mother,” Keith grunted.

Orok held his gaze for a moment, grin widening into two sharp peaks. Keith’s eyes were naturally drawn to the centre of them.

And then he let go, nearly thrusting Keith back a whole step with the force of it, before planting his hands on his hips.

“Must’ve got the sprout gene from your father,” he remarked mildly.

Keith frowned. The uncustomary handshake had thrown him off kilter and given him a skewed start to what was now becoming a further skewed conversation. He’d known he was different walking into the Marmoran base, and he knew that he was different now that he was inside it. Orok’s line of questioning only served to further remind him of that.

Keith bit the inside of his cheek.

“Sprout gene?”

“Yeah, like a sprout,” Orok affirmed. “A few Galra have it. Basically means you’re nippy. OW!”

Orok folded nearly in half as the second Blade delivered a swift kick to his knee.

“It’s called the _scout_ gene. And it is extremely useful for espionage.”

Keith was surprised to hear a female voice from under the hood. He was more surprised to see a female face appear from behind the mask as it distorted into transparency. It struck him then that he hadn’t seen a female Galra before, nor had he tried to envision one until the second he’d heard her speak. This meant that his brain only had roughly two ticks to clumsily cobble together an expectation before he was presented with the reality.

“Ignore him,” the female Galra said, turning to Keith. “I am Eshka.”

She held out her arm in formal greeting. Keith adjusted himself to Galra custom and grasped her soundly by the forearm. The gesture brought the two of them a step closer, allowing Keith the opportunity to take a better look at Eshka’s face.

Her skin was the same muted violet as the others, her eyes the same shiny yellow, but they curved up at a sharper angle, giving her a more feline appearance.

“Keith. It’s nice to meet you,” Keith said politely.

“Alright, let’s get this show on the road,” Orok announced.

He stood awkwardly, still nursing his knee whilst shooting a half-hearted glare in Eshka’s direction. She pointedly ignored him.

“Follow us this way, Keith. We’ll show you around the base.”

  


**

 

On Keith’s first day at the Garrison, he had somehow managed to get utterly and inexplicably lost whilst on his way to a class.

The white geometric cut of the walls had folded into an indecipherable pattern the further down them he walked, each corner creating a new puzzle piece that Keith had nowhere to put. When he’d finally found the class room, it had looked exactly the same as every other room he’d passed, save for the chipped engraving plastered over the door that boasted the room’s number.

Keith had received a scolding for tardiness that did little to help him remember the path to the classroom in the future. In the end, he’d taken it upon himself to memorise the turns it took to get wherever he needed to go from a central point.

It took two lefts and a right to get to the cafeteria. One right, three lefts and another right to get to his dorms. Keith remembered every pattern he needed to within the first week.

As he followed his two guides, Keith came to the deflating realisation that it was going to take him much longer to remember anything here.

Eshka and Orok glided through the base at such speed that Keith barely had enough time to even glance at what he was being shown before they were moving onto the next location. He tried to commit their route to memory, but each attempt was interrupted by Orok waving lazily at a new room or Eshka explaining the facilities.

The Marmoran headquarters was narrower than Keith had anticipated, but that hadn’t stopped the rebel group from making remarkably efficient use of the space.

There seemed to be no end to the labyrinthine halls. They folded over and through each other so much that Keith was certain they’re passed the same support beam three times thus far. Every single passage looked like the one they’d moved through before, tough rock cut through with determined metal and piecemeal technology.

Eventually Keith gave up trying to build a blueprint of the facility, resigning himself to a couple of movements worth of getting lost.

“It’s this way to the barracks,” Orok said with another noncommittal wave of his hand. “You’ve been assigned to dorm ⁊”

The noise Orok made sounded like a letter that had passed through a woodchipper before jumping out of his mouth. Keith stalled, his footsteps slowing.

“I- Which dorm?”

“Dorm ⁊,” Orok replied. The noise sounded worse the second time.

“He doesn’t know the Galra alphabet, _chuper_ ,” Eshka snapped. “Don’t worry, Keith. Orok will show you the way there so you can remember where you’re going.”

Keith didn’t feel that he could articulate exactly how very much he was _not_ going to remember where he was going, so he simply nodded mutely and continued following his escorts down the hall.

As his eyes travelled over the typical stone and metal patchwork, keith was disrupted by a break in the formation. A crack of light spilled over the rough face of the rocks, bouncing over a few stray rocks. Keith’s eyes climb the beam like a ladder to find a small opening like a door. There are hushed voices spilling from the crack along with the light.

“-id you really have to bring him here?”

“It was his choice to stay with the Blade,” Kolivan’s voice rolled out of the room, deep as thunder.

“After you _insisted_ ,” came the reply.

The second voice was the antithesis of Kolivan’s; almost an octave higher in pitch and with a sharper cut to the vowels. It didn’t take Keith long to realise that he was the topic of conversation.

He spared the two Blades striding ahead of him a brief glance before making the decision to step to the side and lean close to the door frame.

“You were there at the Trials of Marmora today. You saw him awaken the blade, _za-kit_.”

Kolivan’s tone was patient, but it lacked all the measurement it had held when addressing Allura. His voice had taken on a softer fashion as one may use to address a child, though it was apparent that whomever he was talking to was far from infancy.

There was a long silence in which Keith became aware of how loudly he was breathing, and the longer the silence stretched, the louder Keith’s respiration seemed until he clamped his fingers indignantly over his mouth.

Finally, the unnamed voice spoke. It was so quiet that Keith had to strain to hear it, physically shifting forwards so that his weight rocked over the balls of his feet.

“He… He looks like-”  
“I know what he looks like,” Kolivan interrupted gently. “But he _is_ Galra. He stays with the Blade.”

The emotional reprieve that Keith had been allowed on his tour of the base was short-lived as his heart sank down to his stomach.

He’d been there less than a quintent and there was already someone complaining about him. Keith chewed the inside of his cheek ragged.

It seemed silly to him then, how he’d assumed that staying with the Blade would fix everything.

Keith had been different from the day he’d been born.

He’d grown up in the desert, he’d been educated at a military base, he’d been treated as a wild thing and an outcast and a child prodigy. Learning he was Galra felt like it had underscored every single experience he’d had growing up with a concise explanation. Learning he was different down to the marrow of his bones had felt like he’d finally found a place where he fit in.

But it was becoming startling clear that even here, in the place he’d thought would own him, he was different. The revelation made Keith feel worn and hopelessly naïve.

“There you are!”

Keith nearly fell over as Orok startled him. He flailed for a second, catching himself on the wall before his body tilted at a dangerous angle.

Orok let out a bark of laughter. “Are all humans this jumpy?”

His laughter was cut off by another yelp of pain, and Orok crumpled to clutch at his injured knee.

“You could afford to be jumpier, Orok,” Eshka drawled as she stepped out from behind him. “Did you get lost, Keith?”

Keith opened his mouth to reply and was promptly cut off but the harsh _snap_ of the door closing. His eyes clicked sideways to look at it, realising with a set of goosebumps that Kolivan and the other Galra likely knew now that he’d been listening into their private conversation.

“Uh…” he tried.

“Come on,” Orok spoke up, rubbing his leg dramatically. “Let’s head to the mess hall for dinner. I’m so hungry I could eat a weblum.”

“I’m pretty sure we _have_ eaten weblum here at some point,” Eshka mused with a vaguely disgusted expression.

She fixed Keith with a curious look. “Can halflings eat the same food stuff as full Galra?”

Keith shrugged. “I guess? I haven’t gotten sick from anything I’ve eaten in space.”

 _“Yet,”_ Orok said with a toothy smile.

Eshka delivered another swift blow to his leg.

  


**

 

Keith was used to early mornings.

Even before joining Voltron, the Garrison had made sure to get them up at an unsavoury 6am to run drills. And even before the Garrison still, Keith would always wake to the sun climbing over his windowsill as it poured across the horizon, saturating the desert with pink fire.

What he was not used to, however, was being roused to consciousness by an offensively high pitched noise. The sound was so loud it felt as if it were penetrating Keith’s skull.

He groaned at the intrusion to his sleep and was halfway to folding a thin pillow over his head when someone yanked him almost entirely out of bed by his ankle. Keith made a loud yelp of surprise as his body jerked, reflexively trying to keep him from hitting the floor.

“Get up, Keith!” Eshka urged, leaning in to speak directly at him.

Keith blinked up at her through bleary eyes. She was already in the process of pulling on her uniform, the dark cuirass strapping into place over her chest.

“Wazzat?” he slurred. Sleep still hung onto the edges of his consonants.

Eshka spared him a glance over her bony shoulder as she slung a weapons belt around her hips.

“Morning roll call. Then breakfast. Then drills,” she listed militantly, her voice dulled by the persistent monotone whistle shrieking over their heads.

When Keith scowled at the speakers still blaring the noise, Eshka coughed out an amused sound.

“It’s designed to be at a pitch that’s uncomfortable for Galra,” she explained. “Best you get out of bed. The faster we’re out there, the sooner it gets turned off.”

Keith emitted another groan as he scraped his body of the bed and into an upright position. A Marmoran uniform had been laid out for him at the foot of his mattress, and Keith obligingly pulled it on.

He followed the other soldiers example as they stood stiff and tall in front of their beds, every inch of them to pulled up to attention. A large Galra from the end of the room stepped between the rows of beds, calling names as he passed each one.

“Keith!”

Keith stood up a little straighter at the bark of his name.

“Here!”

The large Galra paused in front of him, peering the two or so foot down from where he towered above the dark haired boy.

“Ah yes, the greenhorn,” he remarked. It was hard to tell if the comment was meant to be condescending, but Keith felt himself tense under the close watch all the same. “You’ll be reporting to medical this morning for a full examination. I’ll take you down there myself.”

Keith internalised his sigh of relief. The thought of having to find his own way to the medical wing in an unfamiliar base was almost as worrying as undergoing the examination itself.

He dutifully followed the Galra officer out of the barracks and into the hall. He hastily tried to prod his mind into full alertness so that he may properly plot a pattern down to the med bay, but the alarm had left him somewhat disoriented, and his thoughts were moving sluggishly as a result.

There were already a few Blades darting through the hallways, some in small packs of five or six, already fully armed and with their faces covered by the strange dark masks. Others carried small tablets or arms filled with equipment, on their way to distribute resources. Keith watched them pass, silent as ghosts. He wasn’t sure if it was merely the early start to the day that made the base seem to run like clockwork, cold and efficient, or if it was just the norm for a rebel group such as this.

The large Galra stopped abruptly outside a door. Keith nearly walked into the the back of him, catching himself before he tripped over his own feet. The officer rapped once sharply, and after a moment the door slid open with a soft hiss to reveal a doctor.

At least, he looked like a doctor to Keith.

In favour of the standard onyx-dark armour the majority of Blades wore, this Galra sported something a little paler and a little looser that looked like someone had gotten halfway through making a tunic before giving up and simply tying it all in at the waist. He looked a little scruffier than the other Blades Keith had seen, his fur sticking out at odd angles across his head, and his skin seemed paper rough in texture.

“Officer Hizoks,” the doctor said. Then upon spotting Keith, “Oh, I see you brought the halfling. Thank you.”

Officer Hizoks bowed his head in acknowledgement before turning on his heel and marching away without so much as a word. Keith stared after him, unsure of his position in the voided exchange.

“Charming fellow, isn’t he?” the doctor remarked.

His words held the lilt of amusement, and when he turned to Keith there was a crinkle in the corners of his eyes when he smiled. The friendliness of his face was a jarring contrast to the cool and dark temperament of everything else in the Marmoran base. Keith liked him instantly.

“Come inside, Keef, was it?” the doctor said, stepping aside to allow Keith into the room.

“Keith,” Keith corrected.

The doctor inclined his head pensively. His mouth made a warped shape.

“Kith?”

“ _Keith,”_ Keith inferred.

The doctor’s ears flicked back and forth, as though they were trying to hook the subtleties of the pronunciation.

“K-ei-th,” he sounded out slowly. Then, “Keith?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Keith nodded, smiling at the correct sound of his name.

The doctor made an affirmative hum. “It is an honour to meet you, Keith. This is my first time seeing a human halfling. I am Evron, the doctor at this facility.”

He extended his arm politely. Keith took it by the elbow and resisted the Earth-born urge to shake.

“Do you see many other halflings?” Keith enquired.

“Oh plenty!” Evron responded empathically. “There are many half Galra in the Blade. We don’t subscribe to those purist prejudices spouted by the Empire.”

As Keith heard the words, his heart lifted from the seat it had made in his belly the evening before, made light with new found hope. If there were other half Galra besides himself, then it made sense that the fact that he was a halfling was not the source of ire. This left Keith with the conclusion that it had to be that his contrasting half being human which was causing disruption.

The new knowledge fell on a diagonal slant, and Keith found himself slipping back to the same conclusion as before; that there were still Blades whom found his presence unwelcome.

“I hope you don’t mind my curiosity. Humans are such fascinating creatures,” Evron went on cheerily.

Keith paused. “Have you met many humans?”

“How old are you, Keith?” Evron continued as if he hadn’t heard the question. Keith noticed the careful pronunciation of his name, and a small flush of gratitude telegraphed through him.

“Uh, I’m eighteen.”

“Decaphoebes?” Evron glanced over the top of a small tablet he’d drawn out of a desk.

“That’s years, right? Yeah, eighteen decaphoebes.”

“About the same as…” Evron trailed off as he tapped something into the tablet. “And are you sexually active?”

Keith had opened his mouth at the start of the question, and upon hearing the end of it, promptly choked on his own spit. He bent forward, heaving and spluttering as Evron reached out to steady him.

“Sorry,” Keith gasped. “I- sorry, what?”

“Sexual activity,” Evron confirmed. “Are you currently copulating?”

Keith swallowed. His throat felt abruptly three times smaller than he was used to.

“Uh, no. Not... Currently.”

“Okay,” Evron tapped the tablet again. “If you wouldn’t mind undressing, please.”

Keith blinked. Then blinked again.

“Um…”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Evron said again calmly, gesturing at Keith to stand.

Keith obediently rose to his feet, eyeing the doctor as if he were a cobra about to strike.

“I- Do you have a screen or something?” he tried, casting his eyes wildly around the room in search of something that would preserve his dignity.

To his dismay, the medical wing was stark and clinically bare. It made Keith feel as though he were already naked.

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” Evron chimed with a conciliatory wave of his hand. “Galra typically aren’t reserved about nudity.”

“Oh,” Keith said weakly. “Right, I… I’ll just-”

“Hmm, it would seem most humans are shy about their bodies. How mysterious. It’s natural, you know?” Evron mused.

Keith shot him a panicked look, and the doctor raised his hands in a placating manner.

“Oh fine, I’ll turn around,” he sighed as he turned in his seat. “I assure you, this is quite unnecessary. I’m just going to turn back around once you’re undressed.”

Though the comment highlighted the irrationality behind Keith’s attitude, it did little to temper his anxiety at the thought of being nude in front of a stranger. Even so, with fumbling fingers he slowly peeled down the zipper at the nape of his neck and stripped his skin of the tight bodysuit.

“Okay,” he signalled once he’d folded the suit into a neat stack.

Evron swung around in his chair with an alarming grin on his face. He made no secret of the way his eyes roamed over Keith’s naked form. The boy did his best to cover himself, feeling horribly vulnerable at the exposure, but Evron either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“Excellent!” he piped. “Please step on the scale.”

Keith obliged, curling his fingers around each opposing elbow.

“70 proks. Not bad for your height,” Evron observed.

His nails clicked against the tablet screen. Keith kept his eyes determinedly facing forwards.

“Very good. Okay, please stand against this measure,” Evron instructed.

Keith did as he was told, arms wrapping around himself again. The doctor slapped them away, tutting quietly to himself. Few people enjoyed being tutted at whilst completely nude, and Keith was no exception. He did his best to stand tall whilst the feeling of vulnerability tried to fold his shoulders inwards.

“23 marks. That’s not very tall,” Evron remarked. “Perhaps you have the scout gene?”

“My mother was Galra,” Keith supplied, remembering his conversation with Orok.

“From your father, then,” Evron responded. “Probably a human thing.”

Keith frowned. He wasn’t exactly _short_ by Earth standards, eighteen years of life and two growth spurts pushing him up into the space of six whole feet. But since most Galra stood at an impressive eight feet tall, he supposed that no matter what, he was doomed to be classed as short by Galran standards.

Evron proceeded to inspect him thoroughly, tapping each of Keith’s knees for reflexes (faster than the average human), testing his heart rate and blood pressure (higher than the average human), and performing several bizarre tests that Keith couldn’t discern were part of the physical exam or were actually just out of curiosity. Keith raised the point that he didn’t see why he had to be nude for the entirety of the examination, but Evron just threw his head back and laughed as if Keith had told him the universe’s greatest joke.

He tried several times to ask Evron by what “average human” measurement he was comparing his results to, but every time he tried the doctor cut him off with a new and weird test.

By the time they were finished, Keith felt like he’d been prodded in just about every location he could have been prodded and several places he couldn’t. He put his suit back on with trembling hands and a giddy prayer of thanks that the experience was over.

Evron shared no such qualms. In fact, he seemed utterly overjoyed with the whole procedure, and his claws tapped a merry tune as they danced over the tablet screen, no doubt playing an overture of all Keith’s most private autonomy.

“Wonderful, I think we’re just about all finished up,” he concluded, finally placing the tablet back on the desk.

Keith’s sigh of relief was stifled by a soft knock at the door. The metal plates slid open and Kolivan stepped through, followed closely by Orok who’s pointy face hovered over his shoulder. When he spotted Keith, Orok gave him a cheery smile.

“Hullo, Keith!”

Keith managed a shaky wave in reply.

“Keith,” Kolivan greeted with a nod of his head. He turned to Evron as he said, “I came to check on your progress. I trust the examination went well.”

“Swimmingly,” Evron said with a smile. “Though humans are oddly prudish about nudity. I tried to explain that it didn’t matter but Keith seemed rather distressed.”

What was distressing Keith more was the fact that this discussion was taking place as if he wasn’t in the room. It felt like he was being chastised for something that he didn’t quite understand, and that only deepened his embarrassment. Orok snickered to his side. Keith shot him a dangerous glare.

“Here are his reports,” Evron said to Kolivan.

His fingers played a singular bar on the tablet before he handed it over to Kolivan. The Marmoran leader read the tablet thoughtfully, chin rubbing over the sharp cut of his jaw before he nodded.

“Good. Thank you, Evron.” He turned to Keith. “You’ll be starting in novice combat training. Orok will be guiding you.”

Keith tried not to scowl at the term “novice” if only to save the remains of his already dented dignity. The term felt akin to “child”, and pouting about it would only exacerbate the situation.

“Why do I get stuck with kitsitting?” Orok whined.

Kolivan fixed him with a stern look. “Perhaps you should take it as a testament to your proficiency as a Blade, that I would trust you to tutor the new ones in my stead.”

Orok processed the words for a tick as they rolled over him, before the tips of his ears turned a darker shade of purple. Kolivan strode past him wordlessly. The air of authority that travelled with him was so thick it was almost visible, and Keith was pretty sure the berth that Orok gave Kolivan as he stepped out of the way accounted for the layer of it surrounding him.

At Kolivan’s absence, Orok turned to Keith, clasping his fingers together around the back of his neck.

“Alright, this way, kit.”

And with a swing of one elongated leg, Orok stepped out of the med bay. Keith mumbled a shy “thanks” to Evron as he scooted past on his way to the exit.

“Good luck, Keith!” Evron called after him gleefully.

Keith was unhappy to find how quickly he’d conflated the doctor’s enthusiasm with his own sense of dread.

**

 

Keith had been in two minds about being in the novice class for combat training.

One side of his mind was eager to learn new skills and to better himself in combat. This came with a sense of novelty borne from too much indulgence earlier in life: Being at the top of his class with ease had bred Keith into a careless and lazy protegé, never quite reaching the need to apply himself.

Marmoran combat training presented an opportunity to be tested in new ways, and Keith’s body itched for the familiar strain in his muscles to provide the scratch.

On the other side of his mind, however, stood logic and reason in a stuffy starched suit.

Keith was patently aware of his inferior height and strength, and this pressed caution into clean cut folds alongside his thoughts.

As they’d made their way to the training deck, Orok had pushed a mask into Keith’s hands with a rough, “You’ll be needing that.”

Keith had pressed it to his face and taken the fresh anonymity as a chance to let his aloof expression crack between the eyebrows.

He didn’t expect special treatment because he was half human, nor did he particularly want it when he thought about it. Even so, there was a part of him that clasped onto the hope that he wouldn’t fall mercy to a broken bone on his very first day of drills.

Upon entering the training deck, Keith could see several other Galra already waiting, huddled together as they exchanged low idle conversation.

“Line up!” Orok commanded.

Keith took his place in the row of new recruits: As predicted, he provided a significant drop in the otherwise level line of heads. Orok pulled out his Luxite blade, taking his time inspecting it. Dormant, it looked like a carbon copy of Keith’s dagger. Keith briefly wondered what shape it would take once awoken. The blades appeared to adopt a personal form that best suited the wielder, and since Orok conducted himself with a permanent air of leisure, it was difficult to imagine his weapon as something more aggressive.

“Okay, kits,” he drawled, spinning the dagger between his fingers. “Today we’re gonna be covering some basic hand to hand combat. Easy, simple stuff, so you can put those blades away.”

Keith heard a few malcontent grumbles, and he turned to see a handful of the newbie Blades sheathing their knives. His hand reflexively moved towards the hilt of his own before Orok’s words sank in a little more, and he let his hand drop back to his side.

“We’ll be working on basic self defense today. How to get out of various holds and such,” Orok explained in a bored tone. Though his ears pricked forward as he asked, “Can I have a volunteer to help me demonstrate?”

For a brief moment, Keith wondered if Orok was going to select him out of facetiousness. He didn’t seem like the malicious sort, but Keith suspected that the lanky Galra’s sense of humour hung around the fringes of other people’s bad luck.

He was spared the conclusion of this thought, however, by one of the recruits to his right stepping forward. They were a solid foot and a half taller than Keith, broader across the soldiers, with two long arms that swung almost comically low. Keith had never really appreciated the practicality of Galran anatomy when it came to combat, but upon being immersed in a Galra base, he was beginning to see reasons why the race had been so effective at conquering other planets.

The length and density of their limbs allowed them to generate and maintain a lethal amount of momentum when moving. It was easy enough to imagine that when properly applied, a Galra could quickly and easily overwhelm their opponent. Keith swallowed as he took in his relative size to his peers, and once again made a silent wish that his skeleton would stay intact until the end of the day.

“Very brave of you, Zarys,” Orok cooed.

His grin was positively impish as he beckoned Zarys forward.

“We’ll be learning a basic self defense technique first. This is good for getting out of enemy holds or at least dislodging them enough to free one hand. There’s a lot of damage you can do with just one hand, especially if you can reach a weapon,” Orok’s tone took on a marginally more stern quality.

“Zarys, please place me in a chokehold.”

Keith nearly bit his tongue when Zarys didn’t even hesitate to lodge his forearm underneath Orok’s chin. He hooked his hand into the crook of his opposing elbow, and Keith watched with some small alarm as the young Blade _pressed_ very deliberately onto Orok’s windpipe.

In a blink, Zarys was on the floor, long limbs stretched into four wide points over the metal tiles of the training deck. Keith could hear a soft groan permeate the mask over his face.

“Well done, Zarys!” Orok praised beatifically.

He seemed more proud of himself than the unfortunate volunteer, given the wicked tilt to his smile.

“Can anyone tell me what I did to get out of the chokehold?”

Keith’s mouth only opened to gape, his lips not forming any words to properly voice his astonishment. The move had been quick, precise, with the potential for being deadly. It had also been far too rapid for Keith to properly see it, and so he hurriedly closed his jaw for fear of being prompted for an answer.

When no one spoke, Orok’s grin got even toothier.

“Okay then, let’s walk through it slowly.”

He bent down and peeled Zarys off the floor by the scruff of his neck, placing him on his feet as easily as one would put a down a salt shaker.

“Zarys, once again. Arms around my neck,” Orok instructed.

The young Blade did hesitate this time, though his arms had already raised halfway towards his mentor automatically. It was as though his body recognised the command but his brain was questioning it. Keith supposed Zarys was in two minds about training as well.

Still, he complied with the order, repositioning his arms into a (albeit much looser) hold around Orok’s throat.

Orok blocked out the basic technique, showing them all in very key steps where to position their weight and which areas they should hold onto. He also reversed his position with Zarys and demonstrated numerous ways that would be ineffective in breaking a chokehold.

Most of these demonstrations ended with poor Zarys finding a violent meeting with the floor.

“Recruits!” Orok chirped. “Assemble into pairs. You will be practising this move for the next half a varga.”

Keith stood awkwardly as the rest of the group split off into twos. Someone approached him, their height casting a slim shadow over his face, and Keith tilted his head to peer up at them.

It was immediately obvious that the height difference was going to pose a problem.

Orok slunk towards the pair of them, as if he too had predicted this particular hurdle.

“Keith,” he addressed the boy. “Things are gonna be a bit harder for you since you’re so short, but it’s important that you learn how to tackle enemies that have superior height and strength. This is why Kolivan put you in basic combat.”

Keith’s ego evaporated as soon as the explanation fell from Orok’s lips. They were right. He _was_ small, and if that meant he had to start from the beginning to learn how to overcome such a disadvantage, then there was no better place for him to be.

“Start slow,” Orok advised, gesturing for the other recruit to step forward. “Norva, was it?”

The younger Blade nodded in confirmation and Orok nodded back in acknowledgement.

“Keith, you’ll be defending first. Please assume the stance.”

Keith tried to quash his inflating sense of dread as Norva hooked her forearm under his chin. Her arm was so thick that he could feel the hard edge of her vambrace glide uncomfortably over his collarbones. She gripped the crook of her opposite elbow and carefully applied pressure.

Keith wasn’t a stranger to self defense. Shiro had made him break out of this exact grip several times in training. Keith had felt a firm sense of accomplishment at being able to free himself with effort to spare, but with the newfound knowledge that he had Galra blood running through his veins, the victory seemed less accomplished in hindsight.

The position he was in now was a jarring reversal. Keith couldn’t help but think that a failure in this tactic would also hold less value due to his threads of human DNA.

He raised his hands to grip at Norva’s arm still squeezing his windpipe.

“Go,” Orok ordered.

Keith immediately took a wide step to the side, twisting in the Blade’s grip around his throat.

Or, at least, he tried to.

The arm around his neck was thicker than ship rope, and it held him so tightly that Keith felt his spine click with the effort of trying to gain enough purchase to turn on his attacker. He grunted, once for the exertion his body was straining through, then twice for the increasing pressure on his jugular. He could feel his face flush hot as coloured spots began to dance about his vision. Panic began to outgrow technique, and Keith slapped and clawed weakly at the arm squashing his neck.

“Norva, enough!” Orok instructed.

He didn’t sound particularly concerned, nor did his face elicit any worry as Norva released her stranglehold, leaving Keith to cough and inhale a series of ragged breaths.

“The same tactics aren’t going to work with your size,” Orok told him.

Keith glared at him. Advice given in hindsight was rarely useful, and this time wasn’t an exception.

“You can use the same principles, but you’ll have to adjust for the disparity in weight,” Orok continued, ignored the daggers Keith was shooting him. “Use your stature to your advantage. You can reach softer pressure points that taller Galra can’t.”

“Can you show me?” Keith asked hoarsely. He rubbed his neck absently, scowling.

“Aaaaaah not without…” Orok trailed off as his eyes focused on something over Keith’s shoulder. “Lance!”

Keith’s body turned a full one eighty degrees, and then his eyes continued even further, spinning in their sockets like billiards.

This was largely because something was disrupting the strict lines of the parallel sliding doors, and without two borders to trap Keith’s eyes in the centre, they slid off the edge of the image and straight onto the wall beside it.

It was the small Blade, Keith realised with a start. The very one he’d noticed during the Trials of Marmora.

They were tilted almost a full forty five degrees, lithe body pulled into a lazy curve as they leant against the wall, one shoulder supporting their weight. Their arms were crossed over their chest, only allowing two small rods of purple light from their cuirass to peek over the folded limbs. The eyes of their mask glowed like twin moons from underneath the low hanging hood. Keith’s gaze fell between them, naturally. They looked so perfectly nonchalant that Keith’s brain supplied an image of a denim jacket with a popped collar to the curve of their shoulders, like a rebel from a bad 80s movie.

It was a bizarre thought, imagining a Galra rebel fighter in Earth fashion, though Keith could easily blame the prominent similarity in their heights for that.

“I could do with some help,” Orok called over the short distance between them.

When the Blade, _Lance_ , didn’t move, Orok gestured vaguely at Keith.

“C’mon, Lance. We’ve never had a Keith before!”

Lance maintained his statuesque composure for the space of three more ticks before he nudged himself off the wall. His whole body rocked with the motion, weight swinging like a pendulum as he walked forwards, and Keith could hear every ticking count of it in his steps.

As he moved closer, the dark-haired boy was able to generate a more accurate read of his height.

Though still small for a Galra, Lance had maybe an inch or two on Keith up close. His frame was taught and hard, though he was lighter on his feet than the other Blades, gliding rather than merely stepping.

It gave him an odd and ghostly quality, one which seemed to press aside the air around him and had the hair on the back of Keith’s neck standing up. Lance’s glowing mask turned to look at Keith as he passed.

It is impossible to discern the expression behind a mask. The tell is always in the body language.

So when Lance’s shoulders rolled back and his chin lifted a little higher, Keith felt his hackles raise in response.

Lance stepped purposely toward Orok. At this distance, it was hard not to notice the differences in their stature. Lance’s arms were a little shorter, not quite disproportionate enough to lope along his sides in a heavy pendulum swing. He was a little thinner, too, like every aspect of him had been miniaturized by roughly 20%.

“Now, watch carefully, Keith,” Orok instructed. He looped one arm around Lance’s shoulders, carefully threading his forearm under the smaller Galra’s chin. “Lance is gonna show you h-”

Orok’s jaw dropped so wide that it was almost easy to believe that the bone splintering _crunch_ that had finished his sentence came from his own throat. The subsequent clattering as his limbs spilled around him helped to clarify, though.

Keith froze.

Lance straightened up from where he had just _thrown_ a fully grown Galra over his back like a sack of flour.

Orok tried for a nonchalant chuckle, but the throw had smacked enough breath from his lungs that he only had enough reserved for a painful wheeze.

“And… _hah…._ And _that’s_ how you overcome a larger enemy,” he was able to choke out.

Lance graciously offered him a hand which Orok took, even though he pulled a sour expression in the smaller Blades direction.

“See, it’s about distribution of weight. Now you can tr-”

“Can I see it again?” Keith interrupted.

It should have made him embarrassed, asking. Keith was a quick study after all. But to study he had to actually _see,_ and the move had been so fast it was possible he’d simply blinked at the wrong moment and missed the whole thing.

Orok gave him a very dissatisfied look but begrudgingly complied. Keith saw him mouth the word ‘slowly” at Lance, who nodded his head as much as he could with Orok’s arm resuming its seat below his chin.

This time, Keith peeled his eyelids back with determination as he watched the maneuver like a hawk. Lance locked the fingers of one hand around Orok’s forearm as he drove the elbow of his other arm between Orok’s ribs. Simultaneously, as the Galra mentor pitched forward at the blow, Lance took a wide step sideways, using their joint momentum to swing his leg around in a complicated arc and belt his assailant in the back of the knee. Orok’s leg folded like an origami swan, and Lance stole the opportunity to duck his head out from the crumbling noose around his neck.

He gave the Galra a final shove that lacked any real aggression before stepping back, successfully liberated.

Orok appeared a little less wounded by this rerun, even attempting a grin as he struggled to his feet.

“Did you get that?” he asked Keith, rolling one shoulder.

Keith had, but a small drop of wickedness coiled inside him.

“Maybe just one more time?” he suggested.

His smirk gave him away. He knew it as Orok scoffed at him, turning away to shake his head.

There was a similar noise from beside him, and Keith turned in time to catch Lance’s shoulders jumping in time with it. They settled back down not a moment later though, as Lance turned his head too and caught Keith watching him. He went as still as a statue. The mask offered nothing but flat indifference, and Keith wasn’t fluent enough in body language to be able to detect anything more than a whisper from the smaller Blade.

“Alright, think you’re up for trying it?” Orok pulled their attention away from each other.

“Yeah. I’m ready,” Keith agreed, stepping towards Zarys.

Orok gave him a triumphantly sly smile before looking back to Lance.

“I think we got it from here. Thanks L-”

_“Lance!”_

The young Blade’s name was thrown across the training room like a boomerang. Once the sound of it hit the back wall, it pinged in reverse, bringing every head on the training deck with it to settle on the speaker stood in the doorway.

Antok filled the space between the doors like a mountain, every inch of him broad and hard and harsh as rock. The memory of Antok taking his knife had Keith’s fingers instinctively reaching for the hilt. The following memory of Antok crushing a knee across his spine had them wrapping around it.

Lance strode past him at the sound of his name. Keith watched him go, eyes cutting his silhouette into memory. Once the small Blade reached Antok, he passed without comment, slipping silent as a shadow around the frame of the door. Antok’s mask stayed facing Keith for a moment, the large singular eye paired with his stature making him look like a cyclops. Keith shifted his weight uncomfortably between his feet. Behind him, he heard Orok snort, though the sound felt strangely lacking in humour.

Antok turned suddenly, and he too disappearing around the corner.

This time, Orok emitted a noise that sounded relatively closer to a laugh.

“Not particularly confident, are you?” he teased.

“What?”

Orok paused, lifting one eyebrow at Keith.

“I mean, you shuffled your feet. Clearly you wanted to run.”

“What?! No I- I was just-” Keith reached for an explanation that just wouldn’t form.

Orok’s eyes widened in sudden revelation.

“Oh, maybe that’s a human thing?” he mused out loud. “For Galra, shuffling your feet and looking away are signs of fleeing or submission.”

The explanation paved the way for several emotions, and they all fought against each other as they rose up in Keith, so much so that he couldn’t settle on just one and had to suffer them all at once. Indignance bit into pride which kicked the chin of anger, and he felt his lips peel back to reveal his teeth.

“Woah!” Orok sprang about a meter away from him at once. It was almost enough for surprise to reign dominant amongst Keith’s warring emotions.

Almost.

“Easy,” Orok murmured. He raised his palms forward in a universally placating gesture. “This is just training.”

Keith’s frown doubled.

“What are you talking about?”

Orok’s sigh seemed to deflate him almost entirely, his shoulders drooping in defeat.

“Frax, I didn’t realise this was gonna be such a culture shock,” he groaned, lazily scratching one of the more weathered scars across his cheek before fixing Keith with a purposeful stare. “Baring your teeth is usually seen as a challenge or a sign of aggression,” he explained calmly.

Keith’s jaw snapped closed with more force than he intended, his teeth clicking loudly. He tried not to grimace at the sound, for fear of revealing them again. Orok merely seemed amused at his struggle. His mouth was being tugged at one corner.

“Look, just for now as a general guideline: Don’t bare your teeth at anyone. And if someone tries to stare you down, don’t stare back unless it’s a fight you know you can win. And don’t shuffle your feet.”

Keith made a mental list of Orok’s points. Each one seemed more convoluted than the last.

“I’ll talk to Kolivan about some history and culture lessons for you,” Orok added. The seriousness in his expression wavered for a moment, sliding into misplaced mischief. “Though it might be fun to see what happens when human customs collide with Galra.”

Keith snapped his teeth, and enjoyed the warm curl of smugness beneath his skin as Orok skipped back with a terrified yelp.

 

**

 

There are a lot of things people expect to experience when travelling into space.

The leaden tug behind your sternum as all your organs are pulled against the back of your seat during launch, the dizzying rush of blood to the head as the G Force pulled your soul in one direction and your body in another, the foreign sense of relief as the lack of gravity pushed enough room between your joints for your vertebrae to sigh.

All these things Keith had expected, and subsequently experienced.

What he had not expected from space was an epicurean tour of the galaxy.

To his credit, Hunk had taken the influx of weird ingredients in stride, experimenting with bizarre and occasionally risky combinations in order to produce hearty meals for their team aboard the Castle of Lions.

Keith had felt things akin to travelling through some of these meals: Grandor root stew had pulled his stomach to the back of his seat, flotus tea had made him so dizzy that Keith was convinced he’d been able to briefly glimpse another dimension, and karun bread had made his bones feel so buoyant that Keith believed gravity had actually doubled by the time the effects wore off since his skeleton felt so heavy.

But there was only so much cooking Hunk could do with new ingredients that would prepare Keith for Galra cuisine.

If Keith had to pick a word, it would be _durable._

Much like the Galra themselves, the food was tough, took some getting used to, and seemed rather deadly.

Keith eyed the _chunk_ of food that had been dropped onto his plate like a brick.

It wasn’t that he was particularly picky when it came to meals. He had preferences to salty and sour things, but the block in front of him gave off a smell that was somewhere between the two, and Keith found himself immediately liking both tastes significantly less.

“He’s never going to get through an ironside fillet with those blunts fangs of his,” Eshka remarked.

“Sure he will,” Orok countered as he slid into the seat next to Keith. “He’s just gotta cut it up real small.”

Keith poked the cube of what had been generously dubbed “meat” with his fork. It moved in an unsettlingly organic way, as if it was still alive. Keith’s stomach flipped at the thought, and he abruptly put his fork down.

“What do humans eat, anyway?” Orok pressed.

He was tearing into his own fillet with a gusto that let his sharp fangs flash between every bite.

“Uh, we’re omnivores,” Keith replied. When he was met with a circle of frowns, he elaborated, “It means we eat meat and plants.”

“It’s the same here,” Eshka remarked, her eyebrows raising slightly. “Galra are also om- omni…?”

“Omnivores,” Keith repeated.

There was a chorus of echoes as the Blades sat at the table did their best to mimic Keith’s pronunciation. One Blade succeeded in saying the word “omnivore” in a way that sounded so viscously carnivorous, Keith shifted nervously in his seat.

The movement did not go unnoticed by Eshka.

“I heard you submitted to Antok today,” she stated mildly.

The statement itself was not mild, Keith soon found, as every eye at the table turned towards him with a spectrum of expressions ranging from curious to ashamed. Keith nerves itched with the urge to shift in his seat a second time.

“I didn’t exactly submit…” he began carefully.

Galra custom, he was quickly finding, was rather like navigating a minefield. An innocuous comment could set off a  whole tango of displays of dominance, whereas the more blunt and upfront you were, the more generous the reception. Keith felt again that everything he’d been taught was being flipped on its side and shoved diagonally through his mind, forcing all the societal expectations he’d learnt on Earth to reverse themselves.

“Oh, _please,_ ” Orok cackled, breaking the silence. “He didn’t even _know_ what he was doing. It hardly counts.”

Keith felt a strange mix of defensiveness and pride wash through him. Though the defense that mounted inside his chest was not of himself, but rather of Earth. Manners were important, and even though Keith had never quite mastered them, he could appreciate the craft.

“On Earth, it’s considered rude or aggressive to stare someone down,” he explained as evenly as he could, though he could feel his lip curling back as he said the words.

Orok raised his eyebrows, grin widening.

“Look at that, Esh. He could be growling right now. Do humans growl?”

The mirth in his tone made Keith pride swell behind his sternum more insistently, begging to be let out of the cage his ribs made. Eshka rolled her eyes and flicked a piece of fillet at Orok. Keith automatically flinched: Ironside fillet had evidently not been named for its light and buttery texture.

“You _know_ humans don’t growl, wyrm. Not like that anyway.”

Orok shrugged. His grin refused to shrink.

Keith’s thoughts snagged on Eshka’s statement.

“How do you kno-”

“Oh hey,” one of the other Blades who’s name Keith hadn’t caught interrupted. “Antok and Lance are back.”

The words flung Keith’s eyes across the stretch of mess hall where they landed on Antok and the smaller Blade, Lance, from earlier.

Stood next to each other, their appearance was almost comical. The contrast in their stature seemed to exaggerate one another: Beside Antok, Lance seemed lean and wiry, slight in his build and agile in his movements. Next to Lance, Antok almost doubled in size, his shoulders more than twice the width of Lance’s, and the bulk of his build lumbered side to side as he walked, dense and powerful.

As if sensing Keith’s gaze, Lance’s head twitched towards him.

It was impossible to say if their eyes met.

Lance’s face was still very much obscured by the mask. He could have been looking at something on the back wall for all Keith was aware.

But the tell was in the body language; Lance’s chin tilted up a fraction, and his shoulders squared proudly before he looked away.

Keith continued to stare, watching as the two of them assumed seats by Kolivan. Lance sidled in so close that the blue hues of his suit blended into those of Kolvian’s tunic, making them just one Blade. Antok made a sound of amusement and batted Lance further down the bench, giving their leader some considerable breathing room. Lance yelped, losing his balance for a moment before he righted himself and promptly vaulted across the table.

It was a shocking thing to see a sinewy warrior launch themself at a target more than twice their size. It was more shocking to see the same warrior manage to dislodge the mountain of a target from their seat.

Antok tipped back onto the floor at an alarming speed. He let the momentum roll him, managing to get his feet underneath him not a tick before Lance launched a secondary assault.

This time, Antok seemed prepared.

He plucked Lance out of the air with one hand and tucked him under his other arm.

Lance struggling valiantly for a whole three ticks, long limbs splaying out at angles and speeds that were hard to follow, like an excited pinwheel, before he went entirely limp, allowing himself to be tucked into Antok’s hip. There came an air of resignation with the motion, one that hinted this was a common occurrence, and that the struggle seemed to have been entirely for show.

There were a lot of things Galra did that seemed to be entirely for show, Keith was learning.

“They’re at it again,” Eshka sighed.

Keith turned around to see her with her eyes also perched on the scene in front of them. She seemed less amused and more… Fond?

The description didn’t feel like it was quite right.

Everything about the Galra and the Blades that Keith had learnt was hard, right down to the food they were eating.

But Eshka’s eyes glinted with less chrome and more honey, and Keith warmed at the affection in her voice.

“Siblings,” Orok grunted by way of explanation, his cheek bulging with another chunk of ironside fillet.

Keith’s eyebrows shot into his hairline at the word.

“They’re _related?”_ he cried. There was no masking the incredulity in his tone. The flagrant drop and subsequent lift in the pitch of his voice was so great that it was a perfect echo of the stark difference between Antok and Lance. His throat struggled to vocalise the shape of them.

Eshka and Orok exchanged a look. It was a look Keith recognised; he shared the same ones with Shiro.

“Not by blood, but they’re basically brothers,’ Eshka granted him after a brief pause.

He eyes remained on Orok, all traces of warmth from earlier evaporating.

Orok didn’t look away, but he didn’t speak either.

“Lance grew up here.”

The tone in Eshka’s voice made it evident that that was the extent of information that Keith would receive, and so he didn’t push for more.

Instead, he used the comment as an excuse to look over at Lance again.

Antok was depositing him back into his seat calmly, a low rumble from his chest vibrating across the mess hall. They kept their masks on, neither of the two deigning to eat as the leaned closer to confer with Kolivan. Lance signed a convoluted gesture with his hand that made his body undulate as it tried to accommodate.

Kolivan chuckled, the sound diluted by the rest of the chatter around them.

There was a gentleness in his expression that made Keith’s heart feel suddenly tired.

He picked up his fork and stabbed it into his chunk of fillet.

 

**

 

Keith had predicted he would get lost.

When they had stepped out of the mess hall, Eshka had said, “bye” at the exact same time Keith had said, “wait”. By the time his teeth had bitten down on the ‘t’, Eshka had already disappeared around the corner, leaving Keith in the uncharted intestines of the base.

He sighed to himself, dredging through the haze of his memory in an attempt to recall at least part of the way back to the barracks.

Keith veered left, left, the one sharp right that you wouldn’t recognised were it not for a dent in one of the pipes lining the walls, then left again.

He held a tenuous confidence in his directions right up until he passed the dented pipe for the third time, at which point he stopped in his tracks long enough to pinch the bridge of his nose in the hope that fresh pain would provide some patience, if not some clarity.

Being in the base was so far from what he’d been expecting, and further still from what he’d presumed. Nothing about the Blade of Marmora, nor of Galran culture, felt quite right.

Everything felt like it had been shaken up and rolled backwards with the sole intention of disorientating Keith. Confrontation and outspokenness were rewarded, manners and leniency were signs of weakness. Keith had already accepted that social finesse was an area were he lacked perception, but now it felt as if it were bleeding through to his internal compass as well.

He was so thoroughly lost.

His bones felt leaden after training. There was a finite amount of time his legs would cooperate in carrying him around the base before they gave up and Keith would have to sleep on the floor, and he felt each second of that clock count down with a keen urgency.

Keith walked through his set of directions again.

There was more defeat in this action than hope or inspiration; the same way you open a cupboard for something to chew on, only to be disappointed, yet open the same cupboard again a minute later in the hope that something would have miraculously appeared to ease your agitation.

Keith knew that this route would take him back to the same crooked pipe in next to no time, yet his feet habitually walked the path and his brain habitually stayed optimistic for a different outcome.

Sure enough, after a dobash, Keith found himself staring at the same skewed line of piping he’d passed thrice already.

Subconsciously, he’d been aware that he would be no closer to finding a bed to collapse onto by the end of his tour. Which is why his eyes very nearly passed over the small scruffy white markings carved onto the side of the pipe.

Keith’s head stuttered on his shoulders, lagging behind as the rest of his body continued to move. He wobbled for a moment, surprise and fatigue failing to mix and causing an imbalance in his core. Once his autonomous functions had properly aligned, Keith leant in to take a closer look at this scratchy picture.

Sure enough, on the side of the wonky pipe sat an innocuous line of arrows. Keith’s eyes traced them with a dawnin sense of hope.

Right, left, right right, straight, left.

Sat beneath them on the wall, almost hidden by the shadow of the piping unit, was a crudely scrawled illustration of what Keith thought was a bed.

His gut swooped with a soft sort of joy.

Someone was looking out for him.

Keith’s eyes read the line again, and then once again after, scraping the pattern of them off the chipped metal and packing them tightly into his memory bank.

His feet did the rest, carrying him down the path of the arrows that now sat behind his eyes.

Keith nearly lost them through his tear ducts once he rounded the corner and saw the sign for Dorm ⁊.

As he approached the door, something odd folded around his sagging limbs.

The air around him stilled, the electricity peaking. The hairs on the back of Keith’s neck stood to attention, the nerves beneath his skin chattered to each other. Keith’s scalp felt two pinpricks of heat as though someone’s eyes were digging into his skull, and he whipped around to spot whoever may be lurking behind.

It was like he’d pulled a plug.

All the static drained from the atmosphere. The halls no longer seemed charged and aching. Instead, they stretched out into dark hungry mouths that swallowed up the dim lighting from the overhead bulbs.

Keith let the moment linger, the final seconds on his body clock ticking away to shut down.

But the halls stayed empty and cold, so Keith pushed open the door to the dorms and cut the worry from his mind to make way for blissful dreamless sleep.

 

**

 

When roll call sounded that morning, Keith was ready for it.

Sleeping lightly was something he’d picked up living in the desert, so eager to hear the patter of rain he adored that he’d tuned his ear to listen to the particular melody of raindrops, so it would rouse him when it came.

It was almost the same with the morning alarm, though in this instance, it was not a sound Keith favoured. Rather, it was one that made his teeth vibrate. And so he figured that the sooner he was up and out of bed, ready to present himself, the sooner the sound would stop.

It was just as Eshka had said the previous morning.

The sentiment seemed to be present throughout the length of the barracks, each Galra snapping to attention as soon as they were dressed, like dominos in reverse.

Keith sounded off when he name was called, short and clipped like the others. Hizkos gave him a once over before instructing everyone to head to the mess hall.

It was fortunate that Keith was attentive in training. No sooner had he stepped into the hall than a sturdy column of muscle hooked itself under his jaw. On pure instinct, Keith stepped to the side, body bowing like a sapling, and flipped the assailant onto their back.

_“Oof!”_

The grunt of pain Orok made was only half formed, thinned by the rush of breath that left his chest as the blow winded him. Keith blinked at him, surprised pulling his face taught. He immediately let go of the arm he’d been twisting.

“Nice work,” Eshka remarked, patting Keith on the back as she passed.

She made a point to step over Orok’s splayed body, eyeing him with enough disappointment that even Keith felt properly cowed. Orok just grinned up at her, all his teeth showing in a way that wasn’t entirely friendly.

“Yo, Orok!” a Blade shouted from behind them as Keith extended a hand to help. “I can’t believe you got thrown by the scout!”

“Gotta build up his confidence somehow!” Orok called in reply. “And he’s not a scout, he’s just small!”

The accompanying slap he delivered the Keith’s back was hard enough to compensate for the throw, and Keith rasped out a cough. Orok just chuckled before looping his arm around Keith’s shoulders and steering him bodily towards the mess hall.

Keith silently crossed his fingers that he wouldn’t be made to chew through another slab of ironside fillet. He was rewarded with an alternative extreme: The substance that was deposited onto his plate was as thick and runny as syrup, and was a colour that Keith didn’t have a name for.

“What _is_ this?” he asked as he slid into his seat next to Eshka.

He picked up his spoon and poked at it gingerly. The spoon got stuck immediately as the substance swallowed it with a concerning bubbling sound.

“It’s pulcher curd,” Orok stated as he shoved a large spoonful into his mouth.

Even the same sounded mushy. Keith could feel it push against his tongue as he thought about it, before it had even formed on his lips. The goop seemed to swell inside Orok’s cheek, and he chewed it with a valiant effort.

“It’s designed to have high energy density,” Eshka elaborated as she picked at the gelatinous thing on her plate. “Since we Blades go through an awful lot of exertion.”

Keith tentatively tried to rescue his spoon as he said, “So it’s basically just pure protein?”

“And fat!” Orok chimed in happily, another spoonful already on its way to his still full mouth. Keith’s eyes bugged at the thought of another mouthful swelling inside Orok’s face, though he supposed it may serve to quieten the Blade’s constant chatter.

The curds on Keith’s plate did not relinquish the spoon.

Something shifted in the air as he dropped his hand from the utensil, the hairs on his neck standing on end for a tick before something brushed passed Keith’s shoulder.

His head popped up like a PEZ dispenser, swivelling almost involuntarily on his shoulders as he caught the edge of Lance’s mask’s eyes disappearing behind the dark swathe of his hood. Antok strutted behind him, a true force of nature that seemed to shadow Lance like a harbinger angel. Keith couldn’t help but be awed at how Lance lacked any sort of intimidation or fear in the presence of the absolute pillar of braun behind him.

Antok turned to look over his shoulder, head tipped towards Keith as he and Lance made their way towards where Kolivan picked at his own curds.

Orok’s words about submission flitted through Keith’s mind.

He held Antok’s gaze.

The massive Blade’s gait slowed almost to a stop. He shifted slightly, turning his shoulders to face Keith more directly. The movement looked like it had been played in rewind, Antok’s feet stepping back into the exact footprints he’d already trodden. A low rumble rolled off him like a wave, nearly too low to hear.

Keith grit his teeth, flexing his jaw experimentally.

A hand shot out to seize the back of his head, abruptly breaking the aggressive eye contact as it shoved Keith’s face towards his pulcher curds.

“What the _frax_ do you think you’re doing?” Orok hissed at him. “Are you _trying_ to get ripped in half?”

Keith grumbled, fighting against the pressure of Orok’s hand in an effort to lift his head.

Having had his gaze forcefully removed from the confrontation, Keith’s eyes instinctively sought to claim it back, like they were being magnetised towards the challenge.

Out of the corner of his eye, Keith saw Orok make a vaguely placating wave in Antok’s direction.

A couple of ticks passed before he heard the massive Galra take a step away, continuing on his path down the mess hall. The assertive pressure on the back of his skull gradually peeled away, allowing Keith to lift his head. He rolled his neck experimentally, shooting Orok a glare.

Orok just snorted at him. “You’re welcome.”

“You said not to break eye contact,” Keith pressed, indignation and petulance making a distasteful cocktail inside his stomach.

“I said ‘unless it’s a fight you know you can _win’_ ,” Orok pointed out.

His point was emphasised by him yanking Keith’s spoon out of the resilient curd and stuffing it into Keith’s hand.

“Yeah, you really don’t wanna challenge Antok,” a Blade further down the table cut in. Illun, Keith thought their name was? “He’ll squash you like a juniberry.”

Keith kept his eyes low as he peered back over to the table where Antok and Lance had joined Kolivan. The glowing orbs on their masks bounced as they talked, tracing swooping patterns across Keith’s retina. He found himself watching the way they moved, the way their bodies swayed with a hypnotising kind of synchronicity that he’d only seen between people with close ties. Shiro and him moved like that, Keith knew.

Lance gesticulated far more than either Kolivan or Antok, and they compensated for his erratic motions with select stillness and deliberate movements. They seemed at ease, though it was hard to tell with their masks still in place.

It struck Keith then that he’d never actually seen what either Antok or Lance looked like.

“Do they ever take their masks off?” he enquired idly.

The question blanketed a stillness over the entire table. Keith turned back to his peers to see them looking back and forth between him and themselves. They seemed at once remotely uncomfortable.

“Not all the time,” Illun volunteered.

Orok’s face stretched into a sharp smile, which was how Keith knew that something was wrong.

“I think there’s actually a rule about wearing masks in the mess hall.”

He said the words in an offhand sort of way, but his eyes flickered bright with mischief. Keith could recognise chaos a mile away, but somehow lacked the power to do anything about it until it had already bitten him on the nose.

Which is precisely why he had no way to prepare himself for when Orok cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered across the dining area, “Hey! No masks in the mess hall!”

The hush that settled over the room was profound.

That was to say it hadn’t been particularly loud to begin with. Keith suspected that the intensive training in stealth coupled with the Blade of Marmora’s need for secrecy had schooled the members into collectively adopting quieter voices when speaking idly. The quietness that followed Orok’s shout was notable because what little murmuring of conversation there had been stilled into nothing more than a muted buzz.

Kolivan’s ears twitched as he turned to face Orok. Antok, too, turned in his seat. Keith kept his eyes pointedly away from the large Galra, though he could feel the weight of Antok’s glare like a heat, trying its best to melt his skin.

Antok growled long and low, though it sounded as though it held more resignation than antagonism. He respectfully lowered his hood as his mask distorted, giving way to two high cheekbones, sharp as cut marble, and a long stripe of hair that gathered in a knot at the base of his neck. Two thick scars ran parallel up one side of his face, racing each other towards the corner of his eye where one peeled off before reaching his temple. His eyes were as flat and yellow as paint.

Keith’s own eyes moved away from them, conscious of not inciting another challenge. Their natural progression over the long lines of Antok’s hulking form lead his gaze down to where Lance was sitting across from him on the other side of the table.

The small Blade didn’t move to release his mask.

The closer Keith looked, the more Lance appeared to barely be moving at all. He sat so still it was hard to detect even the faint rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed. Antok turned away to murmur something to him, the rumble soft and consoling. It cut such a contrast to the distaste he showed Keith that it was hard to believe he’d spoken at all, were it not for the outline of his lips moving in profile.

Lance’s chin jerked at the sound of Antok’s voice, momentarily shattering the statue he’d made of himself.

Slowly, so slowly, Lance’s mask began to dissolve.

Keith watched it with rapt attention, his eyes catching every fragment of colour is passed through, dark and holographic, blue and purple shimmering through the distorting light like plasm.

When Lance lifted one hand to pull down his hood, Keith was already halfway out of his seat.

It was difficult to surprise Keith.

This was largely because he rarely held many expectations. A lifetime of having things taken from him had dulled Keith’s optimism into a very specific flavour of cynicism. So when Keith’s eyes felt as though they were betraying him, his mind reacted with little more than hollow surprise.

His body, however, had decided to offset this emptiness with unbridled impulse.

Keith nearly stumbled as nothing but pure reflex drove him to his feet and into taking a step towards Lance.

Because Lance was looking at him with a pair of bright blue eyes and a face of rich brown skin and a scowl that could cut glass.

Keith wasn’t sure how he got from one side of the mess hall to the other. He hadn’t felt his legs move, yet they had somehow carried him the length of two Altean pods in what felt like under a second. His eyes hadn’t moved from Lance the entire time, trapped by fiercely glinting blue.

It took Antok stepping out of his seat for Keith to realise just how close he’d gotten.

He nearly collided with Antok’s heavily plated sternum before he jumped back at the last moment. The large Galra had stepped quite deliberately in front of Lance, obscuring Keith’s view of him. All the dark-haired boy could make out around the pillar of Antok’s waist was a flash of brown, a wave of brunette locks tumbling over blinking navy.

 _Human,_ Keith’s mind whispered.

The word swelled in crescendo to a shout. _Human!_

The thought of it alone tugged Keith’s heel forward.

The noise Antok made pushed it back.

Keith paused, blinking in bemusement. He tilted his chin up to look at Antok and instantly wished he hadn’t.

There was no question to Illun’s earlier statement: Keith was very aware that he was possibly may about to be squashed like a juniberry.

Antok’s height on its own would have been intimidating, but the breadth of his torso was as wide as a barrel, and arms as thick as tree trunks curled at his sides like springs being squashed for release. His glare was a hard and barbed thing, skewering Keith on the spot. He made the noise again, and deep rasping sound that seemed to bounce back and forth behind his tongue.

Keith shot a glare right back.

It was an unwise thing to do, he knew.

Antok was easily three times his size, and Keith had seen him successfully disarm Lance that day before without as much as lifting both arms to do so.

And yet still, Keith’s jaw jutted out with firm competition.

He was a passionate person. From loving the rains in the desert to battling the lies on Iverson’s lips, Keith had always burned bright and hot as magnesium. His problem lay in that he was rarely good at being passionate about more than one thing at once, which is why in that moment, he knew with singular purpose that he was going to talk to Lance.

Antok seemed to know this too, and his lips peeled back from his mouth to reveal two sets of fat razor-edged teeth.

He made the same short noise again, like an aborted roar, though without the containment of his lips, Keith felt it in full force.

The noise seemed to expand in his throat, a muffled booming as though something had detonated behind his tongue. His jaws parted to let the resulting smoke escape through his teeth with a sharp rattling sound.

The glare Keith fired back felt underwhelming in comparison, but he was sure he got the message across by the way Antok’s shoulders spiked.

The next step he took was forcefully interrupted by a large hand grabbing him roughly by the bicep and dragging him back by at least twice the distance he’d been trying to cross.

“There’s no need for that!” Orok chimed pleasantly. The sweetness of his tone was tainted with strain and superfluous volume. “Keith here was just leaving.”

“But I-” Keith tried to argue.

 _“Right now,”_ Orok insisted. All the humour had drained from his eyes, leaving them a cold shade of ore.

Keith shot a last desperate look in Lance’s direction as he allowed himself to be towed away. Orok’s grip on his arm was so tight it was bordering on painful, and the whiskering sting of pinched flesh was the only thing keeping him from tearing loose and marching right back across the mess hall.

Keith was stuffed into Orok’s seat with all the force of a postman on a time crunch. The hand that pressed leaden onto Keith’s shoulder told him that this was a decided choice, as this side of the bench was facing away from Lance. Once he seemed satisfied that Keith would stay put, Orok lifted the weight of hand, scooting around the end of the table to resume sitting where Keith had been.

“If I had ten gac for every time I’d saved you,” he mumbled to himself. Then, in a louder, whinier voice, “You haven’t even been here a week and you’re already picking fights with the biggest Galra on this base!”

Keith thought that “big” was an objective term here. Sure, Antok was a tower of physical prowess, but he was acting like a playground bully and that served to diminish his prowess somewhat.

Keith’s mouth twisted with stubborness. He was halfway through turning in his seat when Eshka’s clawed fingers on his neck stopped him, her palm providing a dense blinker around Keith’s periphery.

“Not yet,” she instructed firmly. “He’s still looking this way.”

It was clear that the “he” Eshka was referring to was Antok by the way she kept her eyes carefully diverted, not quite peering over her shoulder, but not quite looking at the table either. But when Keith thought about how Lance may also be looking over, his veins began to feel itchy.

He waited with growing agitation as Eshka’s hand remained blocking his view. There were bright yellow eyed stares prickling his skin but they failed to draw his attention back to the table. There were only so many shades of purple he could absorb before his eyes became hungry for a fresh colour, and at this time they were craving blue and brown.

Eshka finally dropped her hand, folding it neatly around her spoon and tugging it out of the mound of curds left on her plate. Keith peered at her for a moment as doubt began to shutter his vision. Eshka caught his eye, offering him a wry smile.

“It’s safe to look,” she teased.

Keith chewed the inside of his cheek as he peeked over his shoulder.

Antok had quite deliberately shifted along his bench to obscure as much of the view of Lance as possible. It was a petty gesture, one that had a pout working its way up to Keith’s mouth.

Even so, from around the bulk of his arms, Keith could catch a glimmer of tawny skin, a flash of bright blue eyes.

“He’s-” Keith breathed. The words didn’t want to form on their own, and shock had drained Keith of the capacity to help them the rest of the way. So they sat on his tongue, useless and lumpy as the curds.

“Lance,” Illun finished Keith’s sentence for him. “He’s Lance. Orok said you met in training yesterday, right?”

The question wasn’t flowing through Keith’s ears right. It was as though someone had placed him in a bell jar, all the soft chatter of breakfast fading into something blurry and thin.

Lance leaned out of his seat in response to something that Kolivan had said, momentarily bridging the blockade Antok had built with his body. His eyes locked with Keith’s across the mess hall, shiny and cerulean, and the rest of Keith’s words heaved themself out of his throat on their own.

“He’s like me.”

 

**

 

Lance had slipped out of the mess hall as quick and unstoppable as water.

Keith could do nothing but watch him disappear behind his mask and hood as a mass of purple hues swept him out into the corridor.

Orok had practically dragged him onto the training deck since Keith’s feet were making a sincere effort to carry him in the opposite direction.

His thoughts stayed in the mess hall, trapped by the image of Lance blinking out at him over the distance between them. And that was where they stayed, even when Keith was thrown on his back over and over again, too distracted to focus on his sparring partner.

After the fifth consecutive throw, Orok saw fit to step in.

“You’re useless,” he said matter-of factly, stepping forwards to jab Keith in the chest with one finger. “You can’t train like this.”

“Sorry,” Keith gasped, rubbing his bruised hip. “I’m just… Tired, I guess.”

“Uh huh,” Orok drawled. The once over he gave Keith had the dark haired boy’s flesh crawling the way an insect crawls away from sunlight. Scrutiny he could handle, but in this particular setting it felt as hot and branding as failure.

Keith grit his teeth. He disliked falling behind in training. He disliked more the fact that he was too distracted to train properly; there was no skill to be earned, only more bruises.

“I think I’ll just sit this one out,” Keith sighed.

He made as if to step off the deck when Orok’s scoff made him stop in his tracks.

“I think not.”

Keith paused, turning to face his instructor his raised eyebrows.

“Do you think you get to slack off just because you saw Lance earlier and got all surprised?”

The sentence was provocative from the words “slack off”, but it was pushed all the way over into accusatory by the maddeningly mocking tone of Orok’s voice.

Keith turned to face his instructor fully, his jaw flexing.

“I’m not _slacking off_ ,” he retorted. His voice came out tight with restraint, warping it into something low and dangerous.

“Oh really?” Orok pressed. “So you’re just going to ‘sit this one out’ when there’s people out there fighting on the frontlines? Hm? Is Zarkon gonna let you have a time out?”

Keith opened his mouth to fire back something bright and dripping with gasoline when Orok interrupted him.

“This is war, Keith. There are no days off.”

Keith was aware that he was being scolded, and the tough exterior of his pride demanded that he repel the admonishment with a barked response.

But strangely, the words were sinking through his skin, settling on the dias of his mind, big and loud and _right._

Orok was _right._

“Sorry,” Keith repeated, pulling his shoulders back a little tighter. “I’ll try again.”

Orok’s pointy smile dropped into something that almost looked sincere.

“Very good, soldier,” he chimed. “We’ll have you tossing yuppers in no time.”

Keith did not get thrown again after that.

 

*

 

It became apparent very quickly that Lance was avoiding him.

Or that’s certainly what it felt like, Keith thought.

Whenever he entered the mess hall, Lance was already leaving, his sharp features being swallowed by the indigo hood as he vanished around a corner. Keith rarely ever caught him in the halls, and on the few occasions that he did, Lance barricaded himself behind Antok who seemed more than happy to stare Keith down when he tried to approach.

Furthermore, Keith was rarely bidden a moment to try and seek the other Blade out himself.

His day had been cut, dried, and pressed into a strict routine:

Wake up, eat, train, eat, study, eat, sleep. Repeat.

It was by pure chance that Keith bumped into Lance alone for once in the corridor.

Keith had decided to stay late after training after Orok had shown them a particularly complicated disarming technique. Keith’s relative strength coupled with his height had him at a handicap, and it was sheer stubbornness that had carried him through the following vargas as he practised the move relentlessly.

It was only when his resolve had begun to run dry and fatigue started to send twitches rippling through his muscles, that Keith finally relinquished his tenacity in favour of a hot shower. His body ached at the thought of steaming water running over his skin, sliding the knots out of his back.

His feet made a groaning sound as they dragged along the floor. Keith’s eyes lifted up enough to spot the dented pipe, and he habitually turned right in response.

He nearly walked straight into Lance.

Keith stepped back, the tiredness in his body making the reflex sluggish and uncoordinated.

Lance in turn merely stilled, his eyes widening into dinner plates as he took in the image of Keith bent awkwardly as he’d tried to catch his weight. Keith’s eyes drifted over Lance’s shoulder. Since training, Orok had been teaching the new recruits to target potential threats, and so Keith’s gaze instinctively sought out Antok’s hulking form. When he failed to fill the gaping space behind Lance, Keith’s eyes drifted back to the boy in front of him.

“Uh-” he started. Lance looked about ready to bolt. “Hi…”

“Hey,” Lance responded automatically.

His eyebrows shot up, as if surprised that the word had left his lips, before his face morphed to scowl at the greeting that hung between them.

Keith resisted the urge to shuffle his feet as Lance stared at him. Instead, he stared right back, using the opportunity to really get a good look at the other boy.

All he’d seen of Lance so far had been glimpses, snatches of colour, half images that were fulfilled by Antok’s firm mass shielding the rest of Lance.

Keith realised that this was the closest to the other boy he’d ever been.

From here, he could clearly make out a light dusting of freckles over the high cheekbones, a sharper, pointier cut to the jaw that he’d missed in his hurried passing. Lance’s eyes were a deeper blue than he’d thought, but the violet lights that lined the base reflected back fragments of cobalt and turquoise.

“Lance, right?” Keith aimed for conversational, ignoring how laborious it sounded. “I’m Keith.”

“I know,” Lance replied curtly.

Keith felt like he was flailing. Small talk was a refined art in which he was severely lacking, and Lance seemed loathe to toss him a lifeline. But naturally, since Keith could only be passionate at one thing at a time, his mouth moved before his mind did.

“You’re half Galra?”

The question tumbled from his lips like a rock, and Keith froze, watching Lance’s reaction.

The tall boy’s eyes got impossibly wider, and his lips parted to form a word but got stuck halfway.

They changed course after a beat, curling into something close to a sneer as he bit out, “What’s it to you?”

His voice was different to how Keith had imagined it, which was a strange in itself. Keith wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but he never could have predicted the timbre of Lance’s voice. There was a very faint lilt to his words, like his accent was peeling back at the edges, trying to reveal something underneath. It was hard to describe exactly what, and Keith couldn’t discern the subtlety of it with so few words.

“Well, I’m half Galra, too.”

“I _know,_ ” Lance repeated.

Keith bristled automatically. It seemed childish to assume that stepping out of his comfort zone should be rewarded, but in honesty, Keith had been constructing a wild expectation of Lance without even realising it.

The idea of having another human/Galra hybrid at the base was novel and shiny, and he only now understood that he’d been polishing that thought in his mind since the day he’d seen Lance.

Now, as the other boy stood before him all hard edges and clipped words, the shine was beginning to dim into something rusted.

Lance brushed past Keith without another word, tugging his hood up as he went with enough force that it overshot and nearly fell over his eyes. It would have been funny were Keith not so dumbfounded by the interaction, and he didn’t have the foresight to reach out and grab Lance’s arm as he moved by.

The tall boy didn’t look back, even as Keith stared after him.

When it became evident that the interaction was over, Keith turned to resume walking to the barracks. He managed to take one step before realising he had no idea where he was.

“Hey do you-”

“If you’re-”

The words leapt across the distance between the two boys, colliding in the air and bouncing off each other. Both boys’ jaws snapped closed.

Keith was staring at where Lance had turned around, his hood safely pushed back up his head to reveal his dark blue eyes.

Lance cleared his throat stiffly. It felt far too loud in the hush of the hallway.

“If you’re looking for the barracks,” he tried again. “Take the next left, two rights, straight ahead, then left again.”

Keith held his gaze for a few ticks more. Lance was chewing the inside of his cheek, but he refused to look away. The corner of Keith’s mouth quirked.

“Thanks, Lance.”

Lance didn’t respond. He simply slipped around the next corner, silent as a shadow.

 

*

 

“Keith!”

The image of Shiro’s face filling the holoscreen flooded Keith with such a potent sense of relief that he was momentarily rendered speechless. He felt his cheek swell with a genuine smile, and he released a sigh that he felt that he’d been holding all week.

“Shiro!” Keith breathed. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too, Keith,” Shiro replied.

“Is that Keith?” a voice floated over the comm.

There was a hurried shuffling followed by a loud metallic clang offscreen before Hunk and Pidge burst through the side of the frame. Both their faces pushed Shiro’s into the corner, and a peel of laughter burst forth from Keith’s mouth.

“Hey man!” Hunk cried. “Woah, nice suit! How’s the Blade? What kind of food do they have? Is it, like, edible? Or do they have food goo as well?”

“What’s the tech there like?” Pidge spoke over him. “Because I’ve been dying to run some tests on what makes those luxite baldes transform and I-”

“Alright, one at a time,” Shiro cut in.

Pidge and Hunk’s faced shrank as they simultaneously stepped away from the camera. Shiro filled the absence left in the frame, angling the video comm link so that he could show the majority of the bridge.

“So how’s everything going?” he started conversationally.

Keith nearly snorted. It struck him as suddenly very amusing that he was having a casual check in about his time at an alien rebel base as though he’d just finished his first week of school.

“It’s okay,” he replied. Then, more truthfully, “It’s harder than I thought it would be. Kolivan’s got me in basic training with the other recruits. They’re all at least a foot taller than me.”  
“HA!” Pidge whooped triumphantly. “See how _you_ like being the smallest!”

“Yeah but you make up for it by being the meanest,” Hunk pointed out.

Pidg preened, “Thank you.”

Shiro chuckled at the exchange before turning back to the camera.

“I’m glad you’re finally getting some decent training. I thought we were going to run out of levels on the simulator.”

“No chance,” Keith grinned.

Something flickered at the side of the frame, catching Keith’s attention.

Allura stood by the control panel, her head turned slightly so that her ear was piqued towards the conversation. She seemed to be making a concerted effort not to look over. The action put a weight on Keith’s shoulders that had only been recently relieved by talking with his team.

“How’s Voltron doing without me?” he asked quietly.

The conversation stilled, the question descending on the team, charged and ready to be fired. Shiro’s smile wavered, dropping into something solemn.

“Honestly, it’s been okay,” he said softly.

Keith didn’t know if he felt relief or sorrow, or if he fell somewhere between the two. Either way, the emotion was complicated, and he lacked the energy to try and parse it. So instead he focused on his brother’s face, watching carefully for any tells that may reveal a hidden message.

“We haven’t had any big fights that required Voltron yet. We’ve most been hitting small outposts and such. Answering distress calls, that sort of thing.”

“That’s… good,” Keith commented.

The description didn’t feel like enough, but he was unsure of how to rectify the lacking in his words.

“We’re taking the time to look for Matt and my dad!” Pidge interjected, helpfully saving them all from an awkward silence. “I think we’re onto something!”

“Oooh ooh, yeah! We managed to find some footage that could lead us to his last known location,” Hunk continued. “Turns out there are more rebels than just the Blade of Marmora. They call themselves “The Resistance”. Isn’t that cool?”

Keith huffed out a laugh. “It’s good to know there are other people out there fighting against the Galra Empire. We’re gonna need all the help we can get.”

Shiro smiled. His mouth said, “We’re not alone, Keith.”

But Keith wasn’t looking at Shiro’s mouth. He was looking higher, and Shiro’s eyes said, _“You’re not alone, Keith.”_

“Speaking of not being alone,” Keith began warily.

He paused before his next admission. He thought about Lance. His existence felt like it had been kept a secret from Keith until Orok had gleefully revealed it in the mess hall. And now, Keith was filled with a strange desire to keep it to himself. This wasn’t because he was dishonest, Keith rarely lied since he felt that it seldom did good. But there was an electric type of smugness that came from holding a secret in your palm, an indulgence that seemed to expand the more people you kept it from.

“Keith?” Shiro prompted after a moment.

Keith realised then that he’d left the sentence hanging, and he blinked up at the grainy, too-bright image of his brother waiting patiently on the other side of the comm link. The secret seemed to quiver in Keith’s hand.

“I’m…” he started. “There’s another half-human. Here. At the base.”

_“WHAT?!”_

It was Pidge who responded first. Keith felt her seize the statement from his lips and hold it up to the light for inspection. He immediately wished he’d kept it to himself.

“Where? Are they there with you now? How did they get there? Just how many Galra are on Earth?”

“Yeah, seriously,” Hunk weighed in. “Did we, like, get invaded and just not realise or something?”

“He’s not here now,” Keith cut in. “I… He doesn’t like me much?”

Keith watched as Shiro’s brow folded over his eyes, his mouth twisting into that crooked line that meant he was concerned but didn’t want to seem so.

“What do you mean?” Shiro asked carefully. “Have you spoken to him?”

“Not really,” Keith huffed. “I can’t really get close to him, he’s always got Antok with him.”

“Antok? Is that the big one?”

“Yeah, that guy is a mountain. He’s always growling at me whenever I get too close. Orok says it’s a Galra thing.”

“Jeez, touchy,” Hunk grimaced.

Shiro’s frown worsened.

“Why wouldn’t he want you getting close to this other Blade?”

“I don’t know!” Keith threw his hands up with exasperation. “But I can’t exactly demand Lance speaks to me.”  
“Lance?” Pidge piped up.

“That’s his name,” Keith elaborated.

A single one of Pidge’s eyebrows arched. It was a dangerous curve that Keith knew only emerged whenever they were planning an experiment. He tried not to squirm at the thought.

“Do you have any training with him?” Shiro mused. “Perhaps you could approach him then?”

Keith turned the idea over in his head like a smooth stone, feeling the edges of it. Training with Lance wasn't a terrible suggestion, but then again, Keith ahd seen what Lance had done to Orok, and he wondered how Lance would behave if the two of them were placed in the same situation.

“Yeah. I'll think it over,” he said eventually.

Shiro regarded him closely. Keith stared back plainly. Over his brothers' shoulder, Keith could see Pidge still smirking, brow quirked in an infuriatingly curious way.

“Okay,” Shiro seemed satisfied with his response. “Make sure to check in next week. We'll see where we are with Kolivan's intel and if we can crossover sometime in the future. It would be good to see you.”

Keith's heart floated up to meet the words as the dropped into his chest, and then it floated further to lift the corners of his mouth into a smile.

“Thanks, Shiro.”

  
  
  


*

 

Since meeting Lance in the hallway, Keith had begun encountering the other boy more and more. He wasn’t sure if it was because Lance had decided to stop ignoring him, or because he’d decided that doing so was fruitless. With Blade activities being largely communal, it was inevitable that they would see each other about the base.

Antok still clung to his threatening demeanour whenever Keith stepped within a ten foot radius, but Lance’s reaction seemed to have mellowed somewhat.

There came an awkward sort of respect after the late night encounter in the form of brief words exchanged in greeting, a nod of acknowledgement, the sparing of animosity.

That was not to say, however, that much more had come out of their minimal interactions.

Lance still seemed to want to keep his distance, despite Keith’s best efforts to approach him, and with the looming presence of Antok, it was hard to get much closer than a muted meeting of eyes between the corridors.

“I can’t even say ‘hello’ to him most days!” Keith grumbled as he parried a blow from Eshka.

She feinted sideways and took a broad sweep at his legs. Keith stepped over them like he was hopping a stream and almost caught the vicious jab that was aimed at his jaw.

“Well, why don't you try and get him on his own?” Eshka suggested. “Talk to him one on one rather than trying to go through a wall to get to him.”

She said it as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and this irritated Keith to the point of distraction. He caught a swift blow to the knee for his lapse in focus, his leg folding underneath him like a tent pole. Keith saved himself a mouthful of training deck by catching his weight on his hands as Eshka danced away with a victorious whoop. He glared up at her, lip curling back with an automatic grimace. Eshka's eyebrows shot up.

“Woah, easy there, kit. Someone might think you actually want a real fight.”

“Are we not really fighting?” Keith countered.

From across the room, he heard a derisive snort.

“Oh, _please._ She's toying with you,” Orok called as he dodged a sloppy punch from one of the other recruits.

Keith huffed with frustration, which only fed Orok's growing smile. He seemed like the kind of Galra who was happiest when poking holes in other people's egos.

Keith rolled back up to his feet, watching Eshka in anticipation as he adopted a firmer stance. Her gaze swept over him sternly, as if sensing the change in his demeanour.

“This isn't enough,” Keith stated bluntly. “I want to get better.”

“You will,” Eshka replied. “But the path to improvement needs strong foundations. You can't build a soldier out of straw. Your skills have to be solid.”

“So teach me,” Keith growled.

He half expected to receive a warning about his tone, but Eshka surprised him by softening around the edges.

“You've got good spirit, Keith,” she spoke gently, as though the sentiment was fragile and saying the words any louder would shatter them. She was quiet for a moment before saying, “Have you thought about how it must be for Lance?”

Keith allowed his defensive stance to drop. The question was telegramming far too slowly through his brain.

So he asked, “What do you mean?”

Eshka tilted her head to the side, as though straightening the thoughts herself. “I just mean, have you considered how Lance must feel, seeing another human after so long? And now you've joined the Blade, too. I just think it must be a bit of a shock to him since he's been here for about 10 decaphoebes.”

Keith tilted his own head as well, though only to accommodate the fact that the information was sliding through his head at an angle.

He truly hadn't even spared a thought to how Lance must be feeling. It was a notion that bred an acute strain of selfishness in his mind, one that made Keith's chest twinge uncomfortably.

He'd joined the Blade because he believed it was where he was needed, and it was how he could best help in the war effort. But now it felt like this belief was cracking, allowing the truth of his plight to shine through, brazen and needy.

There was no wrong in wanting to learn more of your own heritage, he thought, but when it outweighed his devotion to winning the war was when it began transforming into something fickle and emotive.

And Keith had been pursuing Lance for answers, to the point of distraction in training. It was like the trials of Marmora all over again; the need for knowledge driving him through pain and emotional turbulence. He'd allowed Lance's rejection to affect him twice during training now.

It was exactly the opposite of what Keith had been trying to achieve.

It made him feel like that sharp edged hungry child he was back at the orphanage.

“I... Hadn't thought about that,” he admitted, ashamed.

Eshka spared his shame no thought as she lunged for Keith's legs again.

“Well, there's no rush,” she reminded him. “I wouldn't try to force it. Just let him come to you.”

Keith leapt over Eshka's legs again, this time prepared for the follow up blow. He dived sideways, dodging the kick that was meant for his knee.

“And how do you suggest I do that?” he demanded.

Eshka nodded at Keith's progress, but not before she'd swiped the hood of his uniform and tossed him a few yards away just for plain amusement. Keith scowled at her.

“Humans like shiny things,” she said plainly. “Be shiny.”

Keith wanted to point out that not all humans enjoyed shiny things the way she might think, but he arrived at a rather startling realisation.

Whenever any of the Blades had mentioned humans, they'd been referring to what Lance had inevitably taught them. So it seemed irrelevant to point out that not all humans liked shiny things.

What mattered was that _Lance_ liked shiny things, and that was the key to getting his attention.

“Shiny?” Keith rolled the word over his tongue, getting a taste for it.

“Yeah,” Eshka agreed. “Be _really_ shiny.”

 

*

 

There was not a measurement in any Earthen language for the amount of fatigue that sat heavy in Keith’s muscles.

He’d always been a person of action rather than words, and so it was through action that Keith had worn his body thin on energy. Eshka’s advice had gouged a spike in the ground, acting as a goal stretched out far in front of him. And with every extra hour training, every time he scraped out the last of his energy, Keith was closing the gap towards it.

“Be shiny,” Eshka had said.

It was easy to believe that he was with the way that sweat beaded a glistening diadem across his brow, but the proof was truly found in the new attention Keith was grabbing amongst the ranks. It was becoming common for stray Blades to hover in the doorway, watching the new recruits tussle with each other, though Keith didn’t fail to notice the handful of clawed fingers that uncurled in his direction. He pushed his body beyond its limits at every training session, and found that the following day his limits had shifted to be a little wider, a little longer. It didn’t do much more than spurn agitation and posturing amongst the other recruits.

Keith had volunteered to demonstrate a new flashy combination attack, and he was followed quickly by Zarys who was twice his width and apparently had twice to prove. Keith had tossed him with an easy that surprised even himself. The other recruits were slower to volunteer after that.

His body was changing, too. Keith could feel the power in his anatomy as he ran his hands across his water slick skin in the shower. The last of his puppy fat had fallen away, flattening out into hard planes, crosscut with grooves and valleys that deepened every day he worked. It was a strangely satisfying sensation, to feel his own strength coursing through every joint and tendon like a dormant battery just waiting to be linked up to a circuit.

Keith’s knees no longer knocked together when someone bumped into him, his legs had stopped buckling when other Blades clapped him on the back. He felt solid. Even more so when Eshka folded a firm hand over his shoulder and murmured, “Looking really shiny there, Keith.”

Keith didn’t feel like he was shining then. He felt he was glowing, his ego grasping a rare opportunity to preen.

But Lance still hadn’t approached him.

Keith didn’t excel in the act of patience, and so waiting as long as he had was a remarkable feat in and of itself. It was only made worse by the fact that Lance, just like the other Blades, had very much noticed his improvement in training.

Keith would be swept into the mess hall with the current of Blades and find himself caught on a hook of blue eyes. They followed Keith as he’d sit down and would not look away even when Keith met Lance’s gaze with a clear challenge. It made Keith itchy in a place he didn’t have a name for, but it felt like the agitation ran through his very blood.

He wanted to stride across the space between them but the memory of Eshka’s words grew roots down through his feet, and Keith stayed where he was.

It wasn’t until another three movements had passed that Lance’s stoic demeanour began to fray around the edges.

“Lance!”

Orok’s cry of the name surprised Keith so much that he very nearly lost his jaw to a strong right hook from Norva. He ducked at the last minute, his spine twisting in a way that his nerves disagreed with, making Keith wince.

Norva paused her assault, yellow eyes flicking over to Lance before travelling much more slowly back over to Keith. She let out an amused chuff. Keith bared his top row of teeth in return. He didn’t understand the strange fixation that seemed to be travelling through the Blade ranks concerning him and Lance.

Every time they stepped within a 20 foot radius of each other, the pair of them attracted a horribly indiscreet chorus of whispers, regardless of whether or not they actually talked. It made Keith feel like the unwilling star of some ripe gossip, and the image that perpetuated didn’t fit him at all.

He turned away from Norva, eyes following Lance as the taller boy strode across the room. Keith stayed welded to the spot. He was letting Lance come to him, after all.

Orok didn’t share this sentiment.

“Have you met Keith?” he all but yelled, lassoing one arm around Lance’s shoulders and practically lifting him off the floor to steer them over to where Keith and Norva stood.

Keith shifted his weight unconsciously. Norva chuckled again, louder.

Orok planted Lance in front of Keith with the same sadistic glee of throwing a lamb to the wolves. Lance’s face held a wild flash of panic, blue eyes wide and round before smoothing out into one of cool disinterest.

“We’ve met,” he mumbled.

Keith gave into the habitual urge to cross his arms, fixing Lance with a neutral stare. This wasn’t exactly the meeting he’d been hoping for, but he wasn’t going to blow away gold dust when it settled in his open palm either.

“Keith’s been doing really well in training,” Orok prompted.

He punctuated his statement with a harsh slap to Keith’s shoulder blade. Keith felt a swell of relief and pride that his body didn’t buckle under the force of it. Lance’s jaw worked in an arrhythmic tempo. His hands fluttered by his sides, occasionally brushing against the second skin of the Blade suit, as though his hands were seeking pockets he’d forgotten weren’t there. He stilled for a moment before copying Keith’s posture, folding his arms over his chest.

“So I’ve heard,” Lance said slowly, his lips savouring each syllable.

Keith felt himself bristle. He couldn’t understand why Lance was making this so difficult. It was as though he was determined to build a wall between them constructed of snatched, stinging comments and lingering looks that were impossible to parse.

Orok glanced between them a couple of times, each volley from either boy bringing his grin down another notch. When it became clear that neither of them were going to volunteer small talk, Orok sat his hands high on his hips, elbows pressed forward. He looked like an over sized Peter Pan, and Keith couldn’t help but think the comparison suited him. Twice the size of a man, twice the impishness of a boy.

“How about we do some shooting?”

The suggestion was coy enough to snap Lance’s head to the side and he snared Orok with a wide eyed gaze. His surprise soon bled into a fervoured smile, one that pulled a loose thread at the edge of Keith’s curiosity.

“Would you care to demonstrate, Lance?” Orok called.

His voice was sweet in the sickly kind of way. Keith felt his curiosity unravel a little more as Lance stepped forward with a smothering air of confidence.

“Man, who do you think you’re talking to?”

“Thought you’d say that,” Orok replied. “Rifle or handgun?”

“Handgun,” Lance said automatically. “Wouldn’t want to scare the greenies now would we.”

With this sentence, he looked directly at Keith with such thick smugness that it dyed all of Keith’s coherent thoughts red. This was a challenge, and Keith was craving blood.

Orok pulled a high tech looking pistol out of his belt, checking the safety was off before chucking it at Lance. The tall boy snagged it out of the air without even looking. He bounced the weapon in a loose grip a couple of times, testing the weight of it before he curled his fingers around the butt and held it up to gaze down the length of his arm at an imaginary target. The deep focus in his eyes had Keith shivering with dread for the invisible enemy. The blue of Lance’s eyes glittered with deadly intent, less like an ocean and more like a pool of piranhas.

“Gladiators?” Orok asked with a crooked grin.

The smirk Lance delivered was an unholy mirror of Orok’s. “Unless you’re volunteering?”

Orok held both hands up in firm surrender before stepping towards the wall and placing his hand on a small panel. Four gladiators dropped from the ceiling like stones, landing on their feet with a heavy metallic thud.

“Alright, roll up greenies!” Orok hollered over the training deck.

The recruits staggered to a pause in their sparring, a sea of heads turning towards their mentor.

“This is Lance,” Orok gestured to the boy in question. Lance pulled back the slide of the gun with an ominously loud ‘click’. His eyes didn’t leave Keith’s, and the message was clear.

_Watch closely._

“He’s going to be giving you all a little demonstration on how to use firearms in close combat.”

The words fit together awkwardly in Keith’s mind. “Firearms” and “close combat” felt like pieces of two different jigsaw puzzles, and Orok was insisting that they both made the image of a soldier. But then again, when Keith looked at Lance, he saw “Blade” and “human” and those two things fit together even more awkwardly than the first. It was no wonder all four things should be encapsulated by the same person.

Keith felt the other recruits gather at his back, forming a lopsided crescent around the Gladiators. The atmosphere felt prickly with anticipation and curiosity, and it seemed to coat Lance like paint, judging by the way he squared his shoulders and shot a finger gun at some of the new Blades.

“Ready, Lance?”

Keith watched as Lance’s smile became a weapon, curving like a scimitar across his face.

“Born ready.”

Orok jammed his finger into a button, and the gladiators whirred into life. One moment they were marionettes, being of half life and tattered strings. The next they were warriors, joints screaming into perfect placement as they began advanced on Lance.

Lance, who didn’t even look up at the thunderous grumble of leaden footsteps approaching him. The first gladiator to reach him took a swing, metal arm wrapping itself behind the thing’s back before releasing in a wide arc. Lance ducked, pivoting on one foot in a way that was almost lazy.

It was an easy swing to dodge, Keith could have done the same with no trouble.

What Keith could not have done was hook one foot around the gladiator’s ankle and tug so harshly that the sentry’s balance was thoroughly dislodged. Without a blink, Lance whipped the pistol around in his hand and shot the gladiator through the opposite knee. The metal assailant faltered, and Lance snatched the opportunity to swing the robot around by one arm, battering it into one of the other advancing gladiators.

The fourth robot took a sharp swing at Lance’s head, one he ducked to avoid whilst twisting his fingers around the enemy’s wrist. He ducked under the extended arm, bending it at an angle that made Keith wince despite the inorganic sentries, and placed the muzzle of the handgun against the gladiator’s round chrome shoulder. The resounding shot that following cut right through the joint, and Lance ripped the disjointed arm free with boiling ferocity before kicking the sentry to the ground like scrap metal.

The remaining two gladiators had managed to recompose themselves, clunkily scrabbling to their feet as they lunged again at Lance’s wiry form. The tall boy took a wide step, sweeping the weight of his body low as he swerved around the rapid assault like a pendulum, each movement flowing into the other like some sort of deadly dance. When one of the gladiators punches grazed too close, Lance dropped into a roll that Keith barely had time to see before he shot the sentry right through the ankle. It faltered in its stride, the punctured metal of its limb crumpling under the weight of its body, and Lance used the bought time to attack the other gladiator as it swept a kick over his head. With a running start, Lance swung a leg around the sentry’s broad torso, linking his ankles together around its waist as he jammed a punch right into the back of its neck. The gladiators head snapped back, cranium aligning with the waiting muzzle of Lance’s gun. The shot that split the robot’s skull made Keith’s jaw ache with sympathy. It was a gruesome kind of deadly, one that had Keith’s flesh crawling as if trying to physically peel Keith away from the danger.

The gladiator dropped bodily to the ground, and Lance carried the momentum through to a roll. The final robot whirred at him, its ankle nothing but chewed up metal and wires, and it lunged heavily, all thrust and no finesse. Its fingers reach towards Lance as he raised his gun, arms pointed straight out as his fiery blue gaze speared down the barrel.

The bullet he fired pierced the gladiator’s wrist before it carried on right through its forehead.

The detached hand whipped through the air like a pinwheel, intent on burying itself between Keith’s eyes.

Keith saw it approach. He knew his body wasn’t fast enough to react, and his muscles locked together in preparation for the blow.

It never landed.

The sound of a gunshot tore through the air. The bullet did the same, ripping the hand off its trajectory with a noise that Keith felt in his teeth.

The silence that followed was broken only by the noise of the metal hand clattering in fragments across the hard floor of the training room.

Keith breathed once, twice. In, out. As the realisation of what had just happened sank into the fabric of his brain.

Lance had just shot a flying projectile out of the air with barely a second to aim.

Something very strange happened to Keith in those lingering moments.

He’d been commonly told that one’s life would flash before their eyes in their final moments.

What Keith experienced in that moment during training was a distortion of this for two reasons.

Primarily, Keith’s life was not in danger.

At worst, he would have suffered a mild concussion from the flying robotic hand pegging him in the frontal lobe, but nothing that strayed into the territory of “lethal”.

Secondarily, what flashed before Keith’s eyes was not the life he _had_ lived, but the life he had _yet_ to live.

It was as if someone had hit an autofocus button on the world. Keith’s mind sprang into whirring machine, spinning together predictions of his future with the Blade. He fantasized about a future where he too would have the confidence in his own skills to shoot almost blindly and still hit his mark. He imagined a time where he would be able to out manoeuvre his enemy with a proficiency that surprised even himself.

For a minute, Keith felt something he’d only ever felt a handful of times in his life. It was a feeling he’d experienced first when watching his father pull civilians from burning houses on the news, and then later, when he’d seen Shiro accelerate a patchy hovercraft off a cliff without so much as breaking his smile on the way down.

The feeling was inspiration.

Keith felt it bleed into him like smoke, darkening his insides with a novel kind of hunger.

This was something he was craving, something he wanted to become. Important, impressive.

_Shiny._

Lance straightening out of his crouch distracted Keith momentarily from his spiralling thoughts. The other boy stood tall and proud, cocking one hip at angle that _still_ felt out of place amongst the regiment aesthetic of the Blade. But somehow, it felt very much in place within the aesthetic of Lance. Moreso was his triumphant smirk, all crooked and smart as it sat on one side of his mouth.

Orok whistled. “Very nice.”

Lance flicked the gun around his finger in a meretricious fashion, tilting his head a little as he basked in the astounded silence that followed his demonstration. It didn’t stop Keith from staring as the muzzle of the gun span like a top around Lance’s knuckles.

“Thank you, Lance,” Orok crooned.

Lance saluted him with two fingers tapping his temple.

“Alright, everyone!” Orok continued. “Before we get to the fun stuff-” he punctuated this point by toeing at one of the decommissioned gladiators, “- we’re going to be learning about various types of firearms first. How to disassemble, reassemble, all that technical stuff.”

Keith’s ears held loosely onto Oroks words whilst his eyes followed Lance, watching raptly as the other boy cleaned the handgun and handed it wordlessly back to Orok. He turned on his heel and began striding towards the exit. Keith moved without thinking.

“Keith-” Orok’s cry vanished as Keith followed Lance into the hallway.

“Hey!”

Lance slowed but he didn’t turn around, as though he’d been expecting Keith to follow him. The thought was both encouraging and annoying.

In a slower movement still, he finally rotated to face Keith. His expression was a valiant effort at neutrality, but there was a tightness around his eyes, a tenseness in his body that looked like he was straining against some invisible force.

“That was… What you did in there,” Keith grasped clumsily at the beginning of a sentence, looking for something, anything, to open up a dialogue with this strange and elusive boy.

Lance just watched him cooly. All the bravado that had sat in the slant of his cocked hip and crooked smile had poured out of him, leaving him empty as a shell.

And Keith was struggling.

He had hoped he’d finally managed to find a patch of common ground, something he and Lance could talk about. After all, they were both half Galra and they both had mandatory training.

But this common ground was littered with eggshells, and Keith had next to no propensity with toeing his way across it.

“Can you teach me?” Keith blurted finally. “To shoot, I mean.”

The unnerving stillness eyes regarded Keith for a long moment before Lance finally said, “No.”

Annoyance nipped at Keith’s nerves, and his instinctively felt his lip hitch up over one canine.

“Why not?” he demanded. “Eshka said that you’ve been with the Blade since you were ten!”

“Exactly,” Lance replied coolly. He seemed infuriatingly unaffected by Keith’s bared teeth. “Shooting is second nature to me. It’s not something I can explain.”

“Well who taught you?” Keith tried to sidestep the issue. “Maybe they’ll be more helpful.”

Lance opened his mouth, the word, “She’s-”barely escaping before he paused.

Lance regarded Keith for a long moment, his blue eyes tracing something over the smaller boy’s face. His gaze scaled the peak of Keith’s cheekbone, swung low beneath the cut of his jaw, before circling up to walk the shape of his mouth. Lance’s eyes narrowed briefly before widening almost comically in contrast. His teeth abruptly snapped shut.

Lance didn’t reveal what he’d seen. His mouth twisted with an emotion Keith didn’t recognise before he spoke very quietly.

“You don’t know her.”

The words were stained with a horrid melancholy that felt out of place in the militant sterility of the hallway. Lance tugged his gaze away hastily. He looked like he regretted saying anything at all.

The silence that followed felt like a sinking weight on their barely blooming friendship. Keith could see the fragile link between them cracking under the weight of it, and he rushed to reinforce the bond before it could get crushed completely.

“Look,” Keith sighed, running a hand through his hair. “If you don’t want to talk to me, then that’s fine, I guess. I just thought…”

He’d just thought what?

That Lance could empathise with him? That they could bond over their shared heritage?

Eshka had asked Keith how he thought Lance felt about having another human on the ship, and for the first time, Keith found himself taking out the sentiment and really examining it. He could see now the impurities that lined its edges.

Lance wasn’t like Keith.

He had been raised by the Blade. He had never had to question if he belonged, or where he belonged. He had never had to question exactly who he was.

And that was why he ultimately could not heal the void that Keith still felt tugging behind his gut, straining for a place to call home so hard he thought he might snap.

“I thought… Maybe we could train together?” Keith tried lamely.

Lance’s eyebrows climbed very high at the words. He looked too taken aback to laugh at Keith’s hobbled attempt at human interaction.

Which was the problem, after all. Lance’s world was Galra, so simply human interaction would not be enough.

“Train?” Lance echoed. “Together?”

His mouth sounded out the word slowly, trying it on for size.

“I’m smaller than the others,” Keith conceded, stepping on the last of his pride in the process. “I can’t train the same way, I’ll always have a handicap. But you can show me how to get around that. How to use it.”

“You want me to train you?” Lance’s eyebrows lifted a little higher still.

“Train _with_ me,” Keith corrected.

“What a wonderful idea,” a new voice interrupted them.

Both boys swivelled to spy Orok propped up against the corridor wall, observing the entire exchange with a terrible type of glee. In his hands, he held a tablet that beeped enthusiastically as his fingers clicked over its screen.

“In fact,” he sung. “I just floated the suggestion to Kolivan. He wants to see you both. Now.”

The extreme curve of Orok’s smile was a direct inversion of Keith’s mood; he could feel it sinking by the second.

Lance, on the other hand, didn’t seem particularly phased. He puffed out a brisk sigh before spinning on a dime and scuttling down the hallway in what Keith hoped was the right direction,

“Hey!” Keith yelped, taking off after him with a burst of speed.

Lance didn’t slow down this time.

If anything, he lengthened his strides, every extra inch a measure of his spite. Keith’s stride was shorter but faster, and he soon fell in step with Lance. He stuck carefully to the taller boy’s side as they navigated through the labyrinthine base, the silence surrounding them carving a path through any lingering Blades like a bubble of tension.

Keith casts a wary look sideways. It hooks Lance like a fishing line, and the two share an awkward moment before glancing away from each other.

“It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you.”

The words pass through the space between Keith’s ears and promptly fall out the other side. It takes Keith a moment to pick them back up again, but when he does, his jaw goes a little slack.

“What?”

“What you said before,” Lance elaborates, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “I don’t _not_ want to talk to you.”

The sentence is twisted into knots, and Keith has to pick the words apart with his fingernails to try and find the meaning.

“You mean… You do want to talk to me?”

Lance frowns immediately. “No?”

“Is that a question?”

“Yes?”

Keith turned his head fully to look at Lance. The boy looked just as confused as Keith felt. Likely, it was because the two of them had never actually spoken for this long before. Lance seemed to be having a hard time finding the words to properly express what he meant, whilst Keith was simultaneously having a hard time finding any words at all to keep the conversation from waning. Between the two of them, the hope for stimulating dialogue was thin.

Lance slowed as they approached a wide double door. It wasn’t marginally different from the rest in the base, though there did appear to be a tag beside the frame printed with a small line of Galran symbols. Lance knocked politely on the door, only to have it slide open the second his knuckles had lifted.

“Lance. Keith. Please, come in,” Kolivan called from his station.

The pair stepped into the room to approach.

It was not an office, as Keith had been expecting. It was far larger, about the expanse of the bridge on the Castle of Lions. Kolivan stood at the foot of a long table, gazing out across a hologram of the nearby star systems. He swept his hand in a lazy arc, and the image shimmered and vanished.

Keith had the dreadful feeling that he’d been called to the principal’s office.

Kolivan turned to address Keith as he said, “Orok tells me you’ve been showing remarkable progress with your training. Well done.”

Keith tried not to show how the small gift of praise made his heart flicker with pride, an emotion he’d forced to lay dormant.

“Thanks.”

Kolivan nodded to him once before turning to Lance. “He also said you gave a demonstration today.”

“Just some gun work,” Lance stretched and arm across his chest, holding it there with the other one. “Beginner’s stuff.”

The look he tossed sideways was clearly meant for Keith, but the dark haired boy refused to catch it. If Lance was trying to intimidate him, then it wasn’t going to work.

“Good,” Kolivan continued as if he hadn’t noticed the boys’ silent exchange. “I will be assigning you as partners from here on out.”

_“WHAT?!”_

Lance’s squawk could’ve been heard from the other side of the solar system. Keith winced at the assault on his ears, finding the volume thoroughly more offensive than than the indignance in Lance’s tone.

Kolivan didn’t even flinch.

“Keith, you will be moving into Dorm ‡ with Lance.”

“WHY?” came Lance’s next question.

This one didn’t have the shield of volume to diminish the offensiveness, and so Keith scowled fiercely at his shoes.

“It’s not just the two of you,” Kolivan explained patiently. “All of the new recruits are being paired with more experienced Blades and moving dormitories. This way we can give them more experience in the field whilst simultaneously freeing up accomodation for newer recruits to our cause.”

“Oh _sure_ ,” Lance spoke with a flippancy that had Keith gaping at his lack of respect for authority. “Just pair the humans together, why not?!”

“Keith _is_ Galra,” Kolivan reminded him. He ignored Lance’s outburst, but his voice took on a hardened edge that betrayed his stoic demeanour. “Tactically it makes sense. You’re both a similar height and weight. Keith can learn a lot from you, Lance.”

Lance had half a tick to open his mouth with a fresh retort before Kolivan’s eyes turned stony.

“And I might remind you,” he rumbled threateningly. “That we must all work together if we hope to win this war.”

Lance slowly closed his jaw. His eyes took on a misty look, like he was seeing something very far away. Like he was seeing the end of this ten thousand year fight.

“Keith.”

Keith’s eyes snapped towards his name. For a moment, he’d almost forgotten Kolivan was addressing them both, too caught up in the tapestry of conflicting emotions that crossed Lance’s face.

“You will resume training with your fellow cadets. At least twice a week, ensuring there aren’t any active missions, Lance will be training with you.”

Lance’s eye roll was practically audible. Kolivan’s lips pressed as thin as his patience, but he declined to comment.

“Please gather your things. You will be moving barracks this evening.”

The Marmoran leader took a moment to survey both boys. He looked like he was trying to decipher a particularly stubborn math equation; eyebrows nearly meeting in the middle as the corners of his mouth pointed down. The expression glazed into strict impassiveness.

“That will be all,” he dismissed them cleanly.

Keith nodded obediently, turning to leave.

“Lance.”

The sound of the other boy’s name gave both of them pause, and Keith turned to see Kolivan regarding the taller boy with a very strange expression. A face that would have been stern and intimidating, were it not for the gentle warmth in his golden eyes. Keith felt Lance still behind him. He too was wearing an expression that didn’t quite seem to echo the situation. It was a face Keith hadn’t seem him make yet: Lance looked abruptly sheepish.

The thing about looking sheepish is that depending on the person, it changes how they appear.

On Lance, it changed him from a stubborn, snarky, highly-skilled warrior into a ten year old boy. His shoulders hiked up towards his ears as he shrank a little into his own body, his shoulders swallowing up the majority of his neck. His hands stuck tight by his sides, fingers retreating into fists. Keith watched in real time as the entire dynamic of the situation shifted into the shape of something much more familial. He was no longer looking at soldier and commander. He was looking at an intimacy that sparked a soft glow of recognition and longing somewhere deep behind his mind, in the recess of memory.

The feeling had him stepping out of the office that much faster. There was nothing quite like the sense of intruding to spurn hasty retreat.

Keith gazed out into the hallway that stretched ahead of him and sighed.

He had no idea how to get back to the training deck.

 

**

 

Moving dorms turned out to take the grand total of 15 dobashes.

Keith had barely brought anything with him from the castle, and the little else he did have had come from the Blade, making the task of packing his things remarkably quicker than he’d predicted. He supposed it was a side effect of bouncing around care homes as a kid. Keith never knew when something he had might get stolen by another child, or lost in his haste to gather all his possessions and bolt during the rare occasion he needed to disappear. In some ways, moving to a new dormitory was refreshing. It made a marginal change from the rigidly uniform appearance of the base, and it made Keith feel as if he’d achieved something. He’d come beyond basic training now, and was being placed in a proper barrack with proper soldiers. He was no longer a greenhorn, now just a lesser experienced Blade.

The thought gave him a low sense of satisfaction that heated his heart with a constant thrum.

Eshka had been kind enough to escort him to Dorm ‡, though not before she’d barked out a few sharp laughs at Keith’s pronunciation of the Galran letter. Her pointy smile had cut out the sound of it in a way that made Keith wince. Galran dialect wasn’t something he was sure he’d ever fully grasp, or even if he had the capacity. The language itself was as harsh as the race, and Keith felt that his human half would similarly butcher the syllables should he be brave enough to attempt them.

“Hey,” Eshka made a surprised noise as she slowed outside the dorm. “These are the barracks where Lance sleeps.”

“Yeah, Kolivan said he’d be pairin us together for training,” Keith explained.

Eshka’s brow raised into a high arch. “Oh did he? Guess he’s got a sense of humour after all.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Keith felt his voice harden defensively.

Eshka shrugged, keeping her gaze level with his.

“Nothing. He’s right, tactically, to pair you together. Similar height and such.”

Keith said nothing, just waited.

“I suppose it’s just funny to see how Lance is going to behave. You know you’re the first human he’s seen in about ten decaphoebes? It’s no wonder he’s got a bit of a complex.”

Keith frowned. Eshka’s words rang with truth through confidence, but he felt as if he were missing something, as if there was a larger truth in play. Not to mention the glaring neon question that hung over Eshka’s statement.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” Keith began.

Eshka cocked her head, a sly smile working its way over her lips. “Haven’t you already?”

Keith ignored her. “How did Lance _get_ here?”

Eshka’s brow twitched into a frown. “What do you mean?”

“I mean was he born here? Because he’s not just human, either,” Keith pointed out. “He’s half Galra, too, right?”

Eshka eyebrows shot skyward.

“What?”

“If you’re quite finished talking about me.”

Keith and Eshka jumped, both heads snapped sideways to see Lance stood with his weight on one hip, arms folded firmly over his chest.

“I’d like to go to bed.”

“Hey, Lance,” Eshka recovered quicker than Keith, who was still staring at Lance with unbridled surprise.

He hadn’t even heard the taller boy come up the hallway.

“Hi, Eshka,” Lance greeted her politely. Then, with decidedly less friendliness, “Keith.”

“Lance,” Keith responded automatically.

He silently cursed at not having something more cordial to say. But then again, Lance had not invited conversation, and so Keith would not try to barge his way into it. He had enough tact for that, at least.

“I’ll leave you two for the night,” Eshka told them after a few beats of awkward silence.

She didn’t offer any more, not even a word of farewell as she turned and strode down the dimly lit hallway. Keith watched her go, too transfixed with the unbalance of the situation to generate a fast enough reply. He was spared having to mourn this by Lance brushing past him and through the door.

“Just so we’re clear,” Lance told him n a stern tone. “That bottom bunk is mine.”

Keith frowned. “Don’t most people bag the top bunk?”

“So what?” Lance challenged. “I want the bottom.”

“Okay.”

“Good.”  
“Fine.”

_“Fine.”_

Keith and Lance stared each other down for a moment. It was a trivial fight, but it was one that Lance seemed determined to win. He’d grown up with the Galra, after all, and likely grown a sense of pride to match. Keith, on the other hand, who had been through weeks of gruelling training, each day leaving him more worn and broken then the last, had nothing but fierce stubbornness to fuel his side of the fight. And since pride often held a purpose and stubbornness often did not, it became less of a matter of _if_ Keith would look away and more of a matter of _when._

As it turned out, _when_ came almost the moment Keith heard one of the other Blades throw themself bodily onto a bed.

He turned his head at the sound, and the image of someone laying restfully in bed provoked such a ferocious sense of yearning that Keith could not stop from turning towards his own mattress with renewed intent. He ignored Lance’s snort of triumph from behind him as he quickly stripped his training suit and pulled a pair of starchy thin pyjamas over his body. Fatigue led him through the motions of his nightly routine automatically, until Keith reached towards a bed and Lance softly clasped his wrist.

“Nuh uh,” he murmured. His voice stayed low out of respect for those already turning in, but the glint in his eye was virile. “Top bunk, remember?”

Keith glanced between Lance and the bed before gently pulling his arm free with a curt nod. The skin on the inside of his wrist faintly buzzed where Lance had touched him.

He realised with a muted spark that it was the first time the other boy had ever physically contacted him. And it had been gentle. He wondered what the inside of Lance’s wrist felt like.

Wordlessly, Keith pulled his unresponsive body into the top bunk, wriggling until he was cocooned under the covers. Below him, Keith felt the bunk creak and shake as Lance climbed into his own bed.

The dorm was silent and dark, save for the thin beam of light that slid in from under the door, and the occasionally patter of footsteps from the hallway.

It reminded Keith of rain in the desert. Of home.

His eyelids felt as heavy as his body, sealing themselves together as darkness began to hug his mind.

He was nearly beneath consciousness when he heard it. Soft and quiet in the thick silence of the dorm.

“Maria. Emilio. Marco. Luis. Veronica. Rachel.”

The names poked at a sluggish familiarity on the edges of Keith’s mind. He knew these names. These were Earth names. Human.

But Keith was on the heavier side of dozing, and before his thoughts could reach out towards them, he was pulled under into deep and dreamless slumber.

 

 


	2. Cardinal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sharing dorms isn't all it's cracked up to be. The closer Keith tries to get to Lance, the more elusive he is. Until they have to train together, and then Keith starts learning all sorts of things about his partner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's up everyone! Thank you so much for your patience with this update. It's been a heavy couple of months, that's for sure. But I'm no longer working 7 days a week so I have more time to rest and write :D
> 
> I wanna say a huge thanks to everyone who left kudos, you're all amazing! And to everyone who commented, thank you so much for the support, it really means so much to see the positive reception this fic has gotten just from the first chapter, and I can't wait to write the rest of it! :D :D :D
> 
> With that being said, this chapter was originally gonna be MUCH longer (I'm talking double the length here people), but I decided that for my own sanity, I'd chop it and pop in a few extra chapters so as not to overwhelm people with 30k+ updates.

Keith was already awake by the time the morning alarm shrieked through the barracks.

Weeks of rousing to a shrill so piercing it made him feel dizzy had prepared the boy for its inevitable arrival. It had also spurned him towards counter measures.

Which was why when the sound of it needled against his skull, Keith was already in his Marmoran uniform, laying flat on his back with his pillow pressed protectively around his ears as he stared up at the ceiling above him.

For a moment, he was surrounded by the muted shuffle of the other Blades rushing to dress and stand to attention by their bunks, a fixed point of stillness in an otherwise turbulent sea of bodies. Then someone rapped their knuckels against his leg, and Keith let out a heavy sight before gingerly unwrapping the pillow from his head.

He winced as the alarm immediately buried itself through his ears and out the other side.

He slid off the top bunk, feet landing lightly against the floor.

“Ugh,” llun snorted with mild disgust. “Who’s turn is it to wake up Lance?”

“What?” Keith blurted.

He spun around, folding at the waist to peer into the cavernous dim of the lower bunk.

What he saw wasn’t quite the shape of a soldier. It had limbs bending in unnatural ways, the total mass of it looking closer to a Picasso painting than anything Keith had seen this side of the galaxy.

“Get Keith to do it,” someone grunted back.

Keith’s head swivelled at the sound of his name. Ilun gave him an apologetic shrug.

“Newbie gets the honours.’

Keith wasn’t entirely sure what ‘honours’ entailed, but the flat tone of Ilun’s voice spoke volumes on its own. Keith had never woken a sleeping Galra before, and though he was notably more skilled in combat now, the prospect of agitating a highly skilled soldier into consciousness felt like reaching a hand into a lion’s cage.

“Uuuhhh,” Keith leant forward, nudging what he thought was Lance’s shoulder. 

The geometric lump on the mattress didn’t so much as wobble.

Ilun made an insulted sound. “I’ll never understand how he can sleep through the morning alarm.”

Keith frowned. “It’s meant to be uncomfortable for Galra, right?”

“Right,” Ilun agreed.

“So I think you can understand very well how he sleeps through it,” one of the other Blades noted.

Keith’s frown deepened at the nonsensical thought. It seemed far too early to address those tangled words and so instead he turned his attention back to Lance’s tangled form and how he should go about untangling it.

“Hey!” he barked, summoning a little more force behind his voice. “Come on, Lance. It’s time to wake up.”

He delivered this line with a much rougher shove than the last. This time managed to provoke a reaction, one that left Keith with no illusions as to why the other Blades had evaded waking the boy.

In a second, Lance’s eyes snapped open, and in the next Keith’s arm had snapped back, folded in a direction it very clearly was not meant to fold. Someone kicked one of his feet out from under him, and Keith’s cheek made hard contact with the floor.

_ “Ow!”  _ he hissed through his teeth.

“Wha-”

The word was half formed, lumpy and weighted, and Keith turned his head to see Lance blinking fuzzily at him through barely opened eyes.

“And that’s why I don’t wake Lance,” Ilun announced, her tone a touch too triumphant to be understanding.

“Uuuurgh.” Lance’s hold on Keith’s arm loosened like a drawstring as he pulled himself into full consciousness. “Sorry.”

Keith rolled onto his side once the weight of the other boy had lifted. Long slender fingers slipped under his nose, so close that the dark haired boy went crossed eyed as he tried to look at them. The hand in front of his face stilled, and Keith followed the path of the long arm upwards to catch Lance looking mildly startled.

Keith grasped the offered hand before it was pulled away, letting Lance tug him sturdily to his feet. As the pads of Lance’s fingers slipped away from his knuckles, Keith could help but notice the glide of the other boy’s skin against his.

It was smoother than he’d been anticipating. Somehow, throughout the rigorous training and the breadth of the war that had hardened them all, Lance’s hands were still curiously soft.

It was a thought that had come too early in the morning to digest, and so Keith pulled from it the sensory memory of satin skin to store away for later tidings.

For the time being, he stood tall beside his bed, hands clasped at the small of his back as the row of Blades sounded off their names.

“Lance!” the officer barked.

“Here!” Lance barked back.

Keith’s eyes stuck to the other boy like velcro, holding so fast that he nearly missed his own name jumping into roll call. It was only when Lance’s eyes clicked up to his with the shine of expectancy did Keith realise he was being waited on.

“Here!” he called automatically.

The officer grunted in brief acknowledgement before moving on.

Lance’s eyes slipped out of Keith’s hold, but there was a spiral of amusement coiled in the corner of his mouth.

It hooked Keith’s curiosity in a terrible magnetic way. He knew instantly, even within his mind steadily whirring to life through the haze of grogginess, that Lance’s smile was going to become an obsession. It whispered promises of a boy beneath the soldier, and Keith wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d pulled that thread hard enough to unravel the enigma that was the boy in front of him.

These thoughts percolated throughout his body as he let the wave of armoured bodies sweep him into the mess hall. Keith was spared his participation in idle chatter as the rest of his dorm shuffled towards the food queue. It took Eshka bumping a shoulder into his for Keith to realise he’d been staring at the lump of pulcher curd on his tray for a solid few ticks and had been holding up the line.

“Something on your mind, Keith?” she inquired lightly.

Keith dropped his tray onto the table with a sigh. The rest of his friends following suit spilt a discordant tune across the dining space. He barely held the capacity to parse the thoughts swirling through his head, so translating them verbally felt far beyond the realm of possible.

Keith looked up at the sound of another tray clattering a reprisal across the table. His felt his jaw drop.

Lance swung his leg over the bench with a looping grace that came from having long limbs and lean muscle. He barely spared Keith a glance before he snatched his spoon and dug it aggressively into his pulcher curd. Keith watched as he chewed diligently, the food punching a fat swell into his cheek.

A sharp finger flicked the underside of Keith’s chin.

“Don’t stare,” Eshka murmured, bumping shoulders with him slightly.

Keith abruptly shut his mouth. There was a beat of pregnant silence before Eshka leaned over again to murmur, “And  _ don’t  _ issue a challenge this time.”

“This time?” Keith questioned.

His eyes never left Lance, so it was only when a mass so huge encroached on his periphery, draping a thick layer of shadow over the blue-eyed boy, that Keith suddenly understood Eshka’s warning.

Antok somehow managed to squash his burly frame into the space between Lance and the edge of the bench. Or rather, the bench sagged in the middle as he sat down, trying rapidly to create extra space so it may accommodate his presence. Keith eyes got impossibly rounder so that they too could accommodate the size of Antok’s image.

The large Galra in question turned his gaze upon Keith, flat and yellow and hard like acrylic.

Eshka elbowed Keith ferociously in the ribs. The action nearly bent him double, and Keith braced his hand on the edge of the table to avoid face-planting his food.

“Hullo Antok!”

Orok, forever delighted by tension, was the naturally the first to pop the bubble of tension that had settled around the table. 

“So pleased you and Lance could join us for breakfast today. Do you think Kolivan will be sitting too?”

Antok made a noise not unlike a scoff. “Perhaps not if you’re here,  _ chuper _ .”

Orok inhaled an offended gasp, his taloned hands pressing protectively over his heart.

Something very odd happened then.

Lance’s hand shot out and smacked Antok on the bicep.

The action made Keith jump in his seat. Beside him, Eshka bit down on a snort.

“Play nice,” Lance ordered.

Antok growled low in his throat, and Lance wrinkled his nose in response, his face scrunched up enough that his canines were peeking out from beneath his upper lip. Keith’s eyes trace the curve of it, waving into small slanted peaks like a longbow. Lance and Antok hold each other’s gaze for a couple of ticks longer before Antok lifts one hand and promptly squashes it over the boy’s entire face. Lance belted out a loud squawk of indignation before he grabbed Antok’s hand and savagely bit one of his thick fingers. Antok grunted, more out of surprise than actual pain it seemed, and yanked his hand far enough away for him to flick Lance in the nose.

Next to him, Eshka sighed loudly enough that Keith would bet good money she was rolling her eyes.

“To what do we owe the pleasure?” Orok continued, as if he wasn’t witnessing the scrap between siblings.

“The greenies are being partnered up,” Antok replied curtly. 

He was still holding Lance at bay with one hand whilst the smaller blade snapped at him, body jumping in his seat as much as the confines of the bench would allow.

“Aaaaah,” Orok breathed in understanding. “And Keith got put with Lance, I’m assuming.”

The statement caused Lance to pause in his melee, eyes drifting over to where Keith was trying his best not to watch the bickering. The blue in his eyes was steely, hard with suspicion and barely veiled distaste.

“So it would seem,” Antok growled. The words felt so heavy and threatening that Keith had to stab his spoon into the pulcher curd to keep from wilting under them. 

“Tactically it makes sense,” Orok chanted.

If Keith didn’t know better, he would say that Orok was oblivious to the mounting tension that had occupied another seat at the table. But Keith did know better, and the telltale glint of Orok’s teeth confirmed that he was nothing short of delighted at the awkwardness stilting their conversation.

“They’re roughly the same height after all.”

“Keith is rather short for a Galra, though,” Illun reminded them all.

“Half Galra,” Keith reminded right back.

“Which side?” Antok asked.

Keith opened his mouth to speak-

“Mother’s side.”

Lance beat him to the punch. Keith looked at him, turning his head slowly to watch as Lance shovelled a spoonful of curd into his mouth. He did not look at Keith, whose were still parted, ready to reply. So Keith changed the words that were on the top of his tongue, instead, ready to ask, “How do you know?”

“Are you taking Galra studies, Keith?” Eshka tilted her head to address him.

The sudden change of tact had Keith’s head darting between the Galra next to him and Lance, leaving him feeling slightly lopsided.

“Uh, yeah? I’m learning about Galran heritage and customs,” he explained. “Since I didn’t learn any of it growing up.”

“You grew up on Earth, right?”

It took a sharp look from Eshka for Keith to realise that Lance was talking to him. He looked up to see the blue eyed boy staring at him directly, spoon poised in air.

“Yeah,” Keith said hoarsely. Then again, stronger, “Yeah, I did.”

Lance hummed, his spoon slotting between his lips and he mused over Keith’s answer. The dark haired boy spotted and opening and dived at it.

“Did you?”

“Which part of Earth are you from?” Lance flattened his question with all the thoughtless enthusiasm of a steam roller.

“Uh, Texas?” It wasn’t meant to sound like a question, but Keith flowed with it. “Have you been?”

“Nah.” Lance pushed the curds around his plate for a moment before asking, “Does it rain a lot there?”

Antok shot Lance a strange look, his brow folding low over his yellow eyes that were so flat they betrayed no clear emotion. His fingers tightened around his spoon enough for the metal to creak.

Keith thought about it for a moment before responding, “Sometimes. I lived in a pretty remote area near the desert, and we had a rainy season during the year.”

Lance nodded mutely. He seemed exceptionally interested in the way the curds on his plate rolled over each other as they tried to escape the scooping seat of his spoon.

Keith added uncertainly, “A year is a decaphoeb.”

“I know what a year is,” Lance snapped, and Keith abruptly closed his mouth.

Lance avoided saying more by shoving an absurdly large spoonful of breakfast into his mouth. His eyes didn’t leave Keith, though. They stayed trained on him curiously, as if sizing up his next meal. Keith held his gaze. Lance was relatively the same size as him, and though Keith couldn’t informedly say whether he would win in a fight, he knew he stood a much better chance at holding his own than he would in a fight against Antok.Lance seemed to know this too, as he didn’t make any move to avert his gaze. Instead, he withdrew the spoon slowly from his lips, barely blinking as he continued to stare.

Their posturing was curtly interrupted by Antok making a short, ragged sound in his throat. It was enough to startle Keith into tearing his eyes away, resting them automatically on the large Galra. Orok didn’t seem at all perturbed judging by the way the corners of his mouth turned down.

“Not at the table, please. We can all appreciate manners,” he said lightly. 

Antok graced him with a much smaller sound, one that had Orok lifting one hand in a vaguely surrendering gesture, but he abated, shoulders settling back down from where they’d risen in challenge.

Keith’s eyes skimmed Lance again. The other boy had turned his gaze away and now seemed severely interested in the meal in front of him. Before Keith could prompt another question about Earth, he was cut off by Vrek leaning forward around the few people at the table to address him.

“How’s Galran culture studies going, Keith?”

“Ooh!” Orok perked up significantly at the topic, and so Keith reflexively felt himself bristle at the promise of chaos. “Have you learnt to chuff yet?”

Keith frowned, “What’s a chuff?”

“Seriously?” Orok threw himself bodily backwards in his seat, his whole torso creaking into a bow. “You’ve been walking round this base throwing challenges at everyone you see and you don’t even know what chuffing is?”

Keith chewed the inside of his cheek, trying to recognise the word. There was a thread of information attached to it, one that Keith followed like a divergent path to the conversation.

“Isn’t that a thing tigers do?”

“Dunno,” Orok shrugged. “What’s a tiger?”

Keith sighed, breathing out the words, “Right… Um, they’re kinda like lions? Same species.”

Keith remembered learning about a thing in the Garrison called ‘language gap’. His teacher had asked their class to try and describe the colour green without using the word ‘green’ itself. It had been a complicated feat far beyond what Keith felt confident he could achieve, and so he had stayed safely silent. Luckily, he hadn’t been the only one so seek sanctuary in stoicism, and so it was with a mild sort of glee that the teacher had explained there was no way for anyone to describe the colour accurately without an example. 

Keith found himself in the same conundrum then. How could he explain an alien animal to a race of aliens that had never before seen it, or indeed didn’t have an example or point of reference from which to draw their conclusions.

“Are they metal, too?” Eshka asked, curiosity woven through her expression.

“Tigers are a type of big cat on Earth,” Lance chimed in matter-of-factly. He was still licking curds off his spoon without even batting an eyelid.

Keith looked at him sharply. “How do you know that?”

But Lance was already standing, shoving his cutlery haphazardly onto his tray and swiping the whole thing off the table. Keith barely felt Lance’s eyes graze him before the taller boy had turned his back and begun marching towards the exit. Antok stood a moment later, his food nearly completely untouched. Keith spared a thought that he’d never seen Antok really eat, not first with him wearing the mask in the mess hall, nor later whenever their paths had crossed. Keith wouldn’t be surprised if he was sustained by the fear and intimidation surrounding his dominating aura alone.

He watched as the pair of them sauntered out the mess hall after depositing their finished trays. The difference in their size was so stark that they looked like a pair of Matryoshka dolls.

“Well that was… Weird. Right?” Keith asked as he cast an awkward look around the others at their table.

Eshka remained noticeably quiet, but Orok just shrugged with one shoulder as he shovelled more curds into his mouth.

“Have you two started training together yet?” he asked around a mouthful of food.

Keith sighed, running an agitated hand through his hair as he said, “Not yet. But we’re supposed to tomorrow morning.”

Orok’s permanent smirk slipped off his face like butter.

“Aw, I’m not gonna be around to see it!” he moaned, wilting like a flower.

Illun snorted. “You’re just sad you’re going to miss Keith getting flattened by Lance.”

Eshka snorted, too, though hers was derisive and full of offense. “You forget that Keith has been training with  _ me.”  _

“Does that mean you’ll be at drills tomorrow morning to watch?”

Eshka nodded carefully, as though if she did it slowly enough, no one would notice. 

She was not successful, and Keith largely suspected, as Orok began to smile jaggedly, that the impish Galra was exactly the person she had been hoping not to alert.

“Oooooh,” he crooned joyfully. “Does that mean Irez will be there?”

Eshka didn’t bite back with the kind of snappy retort Keith had come to expect from her. Rather alarmingly instead, her ears flattened out against her skull, and the peak of her cheeks darkened considerably into a heavy magenta. The change in her demeanour sparked a soft tittering around the table, and the pointy smiles that accompanied it gave Keith the uneasy impression that he’d walked into a wolf’s den.

 

Against his better judgement, he found himself opening his mouth to ask, “Who’s Irez?”

“She’s our resident weapons specialist,” Orok informed him with a vague gesture before adding, “Oh, and Eshka is in love with her.”

Eshka hissed loudly at the same time Keith dropped the word,  _ “Her?”  _ from his lips like a lead ball.

Orok blinked twice, once at both of them. The blink Eshka received was one of mild bemusement. The one for Keith was plain confusion.

Keith cleared his throat if only for the purpose of scraping his jaw out of his lap.

“Uh, sorry,” he mumbled. Then glancing sideways as Eshka. “So you’re…Gay?”

Eshka tilted her head, “No. I’m Galra.”

“That’s not what I…” Keith paused when he saw Orok raise a quizzical eyebrow at him, slumping in his seat a little. “Nevermind.”

“Gaaaaaayyyyy,” Orok’s pronunciation of the word gave it a superfluous amount of syllables, but still, he look at Keith with some curiosity. “Is that an Earth thing?”

Keith shifted uncomfortably in his seat. This conversation had taken a rather skewed turn, and he squirmed at the thought of having his love life prodded at like a lab experiment.

“Yeah, it’s uh a term for sexuality.”

“Sexuality?” Illun parroted. “You mean there isn’t one universal sexuality for humans?”

Keith balked as his mind turned over the words like a washing machine. “No… Is there for the Galra?”

Illun shrugged. “Some people have preferences, but for the most part no.”

Keith looked around the table at the Galra seated there. He felt like he was seeing each one of them in a completely different light, one that was specifically blue purple and pink.

“Soooo… Bisexual,” he muttered. “All Galra are bisexual?”

Illun raised an eyebrow in confoundment. “I don’t know what bisexual is.”

Keith cleared his throat. “It’s when you like both men and women.”

“Oh!” Illun’s ears sprang upwards with understanding, making her look much younger. “Then yes, all Galra are bisexual. Though as I said, some people have preferences. Like Orok.”

Keith’s eyes snapped over to the aforementioned Blade. Orok waved cheerily at him, one cheek inflated with a mouthful of food.

“I prefer males!” he announced proudly. 

Keith nearly dropped his spoon. 

Eshka eyed him with a fond sort of skepticism as she prompted, “Keith, you were telling us what ‘gay’ meant.”

“Oh uh, yeah,” Keith struggled to recover. He’d very nearly dumped curds all over his training suit. “Gay means you just like one sex. Usually it’s used to talk about men. Women use it too, but they also sometimes use the term ‘lesbian’.”

The Blades sat around the table murmured a quiet echo of the two terms. Vrek fumbled the pronunciation quite impressively, but Keith felt too bashful to tell him that Lebanese was a Nationality.

“So are you ‘gaaaay’, Keith?” Orok interrupted the soft mumbling of their party, still with too many syllables in the word.

“I…” Keith paused to think about the question for a moment. He tried to pull a handful of names and faces out of the thin pool of his romantic interests. “I… Don’t know. I’ve only ever liked one person before.”

Orok tipped his head a little, like he was letting the answer sit by his ear for a dobash. 

“I wonder if Lance is gay?” he mused aloud.

Keith frowned at the speculation. “Why? Can sexuality be different for half Galra?”

Orok’s ears dropped nearly all the way down to his jaw. “Half Galra?”

“Keith!”

The dark haired boy jumped in his seat at the cry of his name. He turned to see one of the other recruits waving it him widely from across the cafeteria. Their name escaped him, as did most of the other recruits names when Keith tried to learn more than two at once. Maybe it was monosyllabic? Tik or Var or something similarly onomatopoeic.

“You’ve got Galra studies,” they called over to him. “You don’t wanna be late for Madam Hollo!”

The sight Keith released was one of agreement, and he defeatedly dropped his spoon back into his barely touched curds.

“I’ll see you guys later?” he told the table.

As he left, Vrek was still trying to change his pronunciation of ‘Lebanese.”

  
  
  


**

 

The Blade of Marmora headquarters was set in a part of the star system that only went away if you kept heading East. 

Nothing made this more evident than when Keith was formally introduced to his private tutor.

On Earth, social niceties were something that he’d begun growing up with, and then growing sideways with, once his father had died. Manners became a conscious choice rather than a reflex, and this offset was a fantastic method of grating on people’s nerves. “Normal people”, Keith had referred to them back then, as he’d been convinced there was something wrong and different about him. He’d had no idea how true these intrusive thoughts were.

At Kolivan’s discretion, Keith had been informed he would be receiving tutelage on Galran customs and culture once a week, permitting his schedule allowed for it. Later that same day, he’d been formally introduced to Hollo.

She was an older Blade than he’d met so far, closer to Kolivan, as indicated by the numerous weathered scars that carved the papery texture of her skin. Her face was bony and sharp like her hands, and her tongue was sharper still.

Keith had introduced himself a plainly as possible, extending an arm in courtesy, only to have her peer down at it with distaste.

“I don’t believe we are yet that familiar,” she told him sternly, before pointedly inclining her head and casting her eyes down.

It left Keith with the feeling that he’d just offered her the equivalent of a fist bump. So when she stared at him expectantly, Keith did his best to imitate her gesture, eyes tipped politely at her feet.

“I suppose that will do,” she said curtly, and then gestured at a seat behind her.

At the Garrison, things had been easy.

Keith would turn up to class, sail through the practical training, and button down to study the remainder through which his natural talents would not carry him. In between, he’d keep to himself. Social interaction was a minefield that Keith could not navigate across, and so he wisely chose to stay on his side of the battlefield where he could dig a trench to shield himself and hide away in. Without the distraction of trying to fit in, acing his classes had been an achievement that warranted little effort.

The Blade of Marmora required significantly greater effort on his part.

It struck Keith as bizarre that something like  _ talking  _ to people would be a subject that needed careful study, but three vargas with Hollo convinced him that not only did it need this, but that failure could provoke a reaction that Keith wasn’t too familiar with: Embarrassment.

Every lesson only seemed to highlight how very little he knew about the Galra as a people. It felt strange to think he’d been fighting a race almost indiscriminately without ever understanding their culture or customs.

He’d learned that there was a powerful sense of pride within the Galran race, one that used to hold honour and nobility above almost all else, but had been bastardized and warped in the ten thousand years the war had spun, into what was now respectively “victory or death.” It seemed that the Empire’s cornerstone of belief was that the ends always justified the means, which was an evidently dangerous way to encourage lack of empathy.

“Have you learnt much about the Galra this week, Keith?” Madam Hollo asked.

Whilst Keith didn’t get homework, per se, he had been strongly advised to try and discover more about Galran customs on his own, outside of his studies. Hollo believed that the best education was immersive, and that suited Keith just fine since he usually learnt through doing. However, the irony lay in the fact that outwardly asking about a majority of Galran customs was regarded as crass and unrefined. It was something that Keith found explicitly difficult to navigate.

“I learnt about Galran…” Keith paused long enough for his cheeks to heat up. “About Galran sexuality.”

Hollo gave him a measured stare. She seemed to be crushing the reflex to call him uncouth.

“Alright then,” she announced after a pause. “Then today we’ll be learning about Galran courting customs.”

“Oh, uh… That’s really not necessary,” Keith began to say. He was interrupted by Hollo smacking her hand palm down on the edge of his table.

“I assure you that it is. If you are to be part of the Galra, you must _ understand _ the Galra. That includes courting.”

Keith swallowed his follow up protest. 

“What’s chuffing?”

Hollo regarded him sternly. “I beg your pardon?”

Keith cleared his throat and tried again, “Chuffing. Some of the other Blades mentioned it at breakfast. Can you tell me what it is?”

Hollo nodded sagely, tapping one clawed finger at the centre of her lips.

“I’m not surprised your comrades were talking about it. Chuffing is a rather quintessential part of Galran customs, though I’d say it’s more colloquial than traditional.”

She levelled Keith with a hard look. It wasn’t aggressive or disappointed, but it was heavy with contemplation, as if she were trying to see an answer through Keith without having to ask him a question to begin with. 

After a moment, she appeared to give up because she asked him, “Have you tried to chuff at all yet?”

Keith raised his eyebrows at the query. “No, I haven’t. Not yet.I don’t even know if I can.”

Hollo’s disappointment was so thorough that it seemed like an entirely new emotion. “Well if you haven’t even tried then of course you won’t know.”

She turned to face him fully, planting a hand on each hip. “Well? Go on, try.”

When Keith continued to stare at her mutely, Hollo’s mouth twisted with that same deep type of disappointment before she inhaled and let out a clipped rattle from her throat.

“Like so.”

Keith inhaled slowly as she had done, rolling his tongue once around his mouth to feel his teeth before he tried his best to imitate the noise his teacher had made. It sounded underwhelmingly gentle, as though he’d tried to clear his throat and had ended up coughing with his mouth closed instead. Hollo’s mouth twisted further.

“You need to place the sound deeper,” she instructed, slowly, as though talking to a child. “It should come almost from the chest, not the throat.”

With one long bony finger, she reached out and tapped Keith just below the hollow dip of his throat. Keith swallowed, feeling his muscles tense under where she was jabbing her spiked index. He used the point of contact as a reference, focusing on trying to pull the noise from far beyond the back of his tongue. He felt a tension in his upper esophagus before it released like a catapult, flinging the noise up into Keith’s mouth. 

It was still a far cry from the noise that Hollo had demonstrated, but Keith felt the rattle of it in his eardrums, a deep and primal thing that made his teeth feel sharper in his mouth.

Hollo nodded once approvingly before lifting the pressure of her finger.

“Good. We’ll continue to work on it in future lessons,” she informed him.

Keith swallowed again. It felt like he needed to put the part of his mouth back in the right order somehow.

To distract himself from the bizarre sensation, he asked, “What exactly is chuffing  _ for? _ ”

Hollo inclined her head a fraction. “It depends on the situation. Most commonly, it’s used to assert dominance. You’ll often hear Galra chuffing when issued a challenge or when they are otherwise feeling displeased or aggressive. Sometimes, it’s a display of happiness, or it can be an indicator of romantic intention.”

Keith tried and failed to align the two contrasting definitions in his head.

“Woah, wait. Did you say…  _ Romantic? _ ”

“Yes,” Hollo told him in a clipped tone. “If someone chuffs whilst around another, it could be that they’re trying to stake a claim to a certain person. They’d be conveying their interest, so to speak.”

Keith thought about Antok growling at him as he’d stepped towards Lance. There had been nothing even remotely romantic about the action, but in the context of dominance, it was clear that Antok had been claiming Lance as forbidden territory.

“You should try chuffing in your social circles, Keith,” Hollo instructed in her matter-of-fact tone.

“Oh, uh,” Keith tried his best not to fidget. “I’m not interested in anyone, actually.”

The sigh the Hollo released sounded like metal in a bad engine, every second of it grating past her teeth. 

“No, Keith,” she told him wearily. “I meant as an assertion of dominance. I think you should try chuffing the next time you feel someone is trying to challenge you.”

Keith felt himself flush all the way to his throat. The feeling of embarrassment he so often felt around his teacher multiplied into a completely new creature.

“Yes, Madam,” was all he managed to choke out from under the beast of it. 

Hollo merely gave her usual brisk nod before turning back to the subject on the screen.

 

**

 

For Keith, sleep was a temperamental song he had trouble spinning.

Sometimes, it was a dirge, long and heavy and uninterrupted. Other times it was merely notes on a page, forever waiting to be realised.

Tonight, Keith’s sleep was between the two; a light melody that came in fleeting wisps and runs. 

Keith tossed and turned beneath his blanket, nodding off between each one, only to be awoken again by some disjointed pause in the music.

After the fourth toss, but before the fifth turn, Keith felt something brush by pillow, gossamer light and swift as it retreated. The drowsy boy completed his fifth turn and cracked his leaden lids open a sliver to peer at whatever had toed the fringes of his consciousness. He watched through blurred vision at the light from the hallway sliced a fat line through the darkness of the barracks as the door was opened. A small, lithe figure slipped through without so much as a breath, eerie in its silence. A soft thud told Keith that the door had closed again, and he sat up to rub clumsily at his eyes in an attempt to clear them of sleep. He cast his bleary eyes around the rest of the barracks. The thin tune of slumber that had wrapped itself over his sight was starting to wane, and Keith blinked as the formless colours around his shifted into the soft outlines of his sleeping comrades. He counted them as his gaze passed over their bodies, their names listing themselves off in his head in a private and silent roll call. 

Keith had almost reached the end of his mental list, bar one name, and so he dipped his head below the squashy platform of his mattress to spy at Lance.

Except that all Keith succeeded in spotting was an empty bed. 

The sheets had been pushed down in the middle, creating a hollow right where Lance’s sleeping body should have been lying. The mattress had sank a little in the centre from habitual use, and, framed by the peaks of the strewn sheets, gave the impression of an open mouth waiting to swallow the next tired soul who lay upon it.

Keith’s legs had slipped off the top of his bunk before his body really caught up with the action, and he caught his hip on the metal of the bed frame as he slid over the edge. But then, his body was out from under the blanket before his mind caught up with that action, and so Keith caught his surprise on the way out the door.

He wasn’t really sure where he was going. There was a distant part of his brain that was telling him he was more than likely to get lost and have to sleep out in the cold hallways for the rest of the evening, but it was a part that was only really loud enough when Keith was fully conscious, and he was currently only halfway there at most. He walked straight, keeping on in the same direction his feet where carrying under he reached something.

The something in question was a border. It had been created by the simple act of a door being left slightly ajar.

In a high tech facility such as the Marmoran headquarters, Keith didn’t think that doors could be left ajar since they were so often automatic, but this thought came from a part of his brain that was only loud enough when Keith was fully asleep, and since he was about halfway away from that, too, it fell to the sidelines as he crept towards the light.

The door looked like it had been opened manually, and then tugged closed behind it. Hastily, it seemed, because whoever had opened the door had failed to shut it all the way, resulting in the light from the room striking a harsh line of light into dividing the hallway.

Keith crept closer to the door. There was a voice on the other side, muted as though he were hearing it through a pane of glass.

“~~~~~ar system~~~”

Keith strained to hear the words, but the vowels were to far out of his range and the consonants alone could not provide enough information about what was being said. Taking great care, Keith pressed himself through the space between the door and the frame. There was a small disagreement between his sleep robe and the metal, but Keith managed to persuade both to be silent enough for him to slip into the room undetected.

It was a room he’d only seen a few times in passing. Wide as it was tall, there were rows upon rows of stacked files, boxes of things that looked as though they hadn’t been touched in decaphoebs, hushed violet lighting casting down from the ceiling. There was a brighter source of light coming from the centre of the room. He couldn’t see it now, but Keith knew there was a circular dais with a ringed dashboard in the middle of the room. It would look like a water fountain, only it rained pixels and data in colourful bursts of illumination.

The voice murmured again and Keith leaned further into the stacks to catch the words that slipped between them.

“Earth.”

The word was barely more than a whisper, but Keith heard it like a shout and he froze as if it had been. There was a soft whistling of pixels as they shifted around each other, causing the light to spin through the stacks in a strange staccato fashion.

“Zoom in,” the voice said again.

_ Lance,  _ Keith ticked off the final name on the list inside his head. 

That was Lance’s voice.

Keith took a hesitant step closer to the other boy in the room, being mindful not to step into any patches of light, lest his presence be revealed by the mocking shape of his shadow.

“Cuba.” Lance said. 

His voice was little more than a whisper, but still Keith could hear the note of hushed reverence in it. He took another step forward and the whistling of the pixels paused. Keith paused too, his entire body locking in place. For a brief moment, he thought he’d been discovered, until the pixels slowly but surely cast more kaleidoscopes of light across the rows of stacks.

“Zoom in,” Lance commanded again, his voice stronger now.

Keith edged towards the corned of the stack that shielded him, peering around it to look at Lance stood in front of the dashboard.

He was tilted away from Keith, only a facet of his features visible on the outline of his head. Even from here, Keith could see the tall boy chewing his lip.

In front of his, sat in the cradle of the ringed dashboard, was Earth.

Or rather, a ghost of it. The image was held by a spider web of pixels that glittered and winked at Keith from where they sat cradled above the dashboard, a phantom echo of a world left behind. The pale globe span leisurely on its axis as Keith noticed a location pin sparking somewhere off the coast of Florida. The fraction of Lance’s face that was visible had compressed into a frown.

“Va-” the word seemed to stall in Lance’s throat. “Vadaro… Varedo…”

Lance chewed the name in his mouth, rearranging his syllables until, “Varadero.”

The word was a failing engine that Lance kept tugging the cord to, the syllables jumping together in mismatched false starts until-

“Varadero.”

The word revved into life, wobbly and jagged.

“Varadero,” Lance said it again with hard certainty.

The globe shimmered and enlarged again as it complied, like it had been waiting for Lance to be sure. There was nothing beyond the simple outline of the place, nothing at all photographic or specific, but Lance stared at it all the same. The silence seemed strangely poignant, and Keith felt all at once that he was intruding on something extremely personal.

He didn’t know much about Lance; the things that he did know could be summarised on one hand.

He’d been with the Blade roughly ten decaphoebs.

He was the adopted younger brother of Antok.

He was half Galra.

 

_ Imagine how it must be for Lance,  _ Eshka had told Keith.

 

It must be so strange, Keith thought, to encounter someone so like yourself in the midst of war and destruction and the great chasm of space. How rare and wonderful.

Keith made a quiet promise then, crouched between the rolling stacks in the dim twilight cast by the shadow of Earth:

If Lance had questions, he would answer them.

And maybe, hopefully, Lance would answer his in return.

Quietly, so as not to intrude any further, Keith extracted himself from the room and made his way back to his bed. 

He didn’t hear Lance return that night.

 

**

 

Training was something Keith had always enjoyed.

He’d enjoyed it when he was part of Voltron, and he’d done so more after joining the Blade of Marmora. There was an intense satisfaction that came with learning and applying new skills. It was like earning something that was more valuable than material possessions. Yet a large part of his enjoyment after joining the Blade had come from the excitement of discovering new tactics, and now the novelty was wearing thin, Keith was beginning to feel the fatigue of the daily regimen settle into the marrow of his bones. 

He hated himself for making excuses, but Keith had a hunch that his human side stunted his longevity when it came to extreme physical exercise. The other blades, even the other half galra, all seemed to have an extra foot on him in height. It would make sense that they had an extra hour or two in terms of stamina.

It was an advantage that Lance seemed to be fully exploiting as he fired shot after shot at Keith’s head.

“You can’t hit me from all the way over there!” he taunted from his position in the centre of the training deck.

“Well then why don’t you come over here and make it easier for me?” Keith hissed through gritted teeth. 

A shower of sparks flew over his head, shattering into dust as the shot hit the wall. Lance was missing on purpose, Keith was sure. It didn’t nothing to quell the rabid anger that was bubbling in his gut. Lance clucked his tongue disapprovingly.

“That’s not the point of the exercise, Keith,” he drawled. “The assignment is to evade and counter strike against long range enemies.”

The next shot that hit the wall hadn’t even been aimed; Lance was too busy supposedly inspecting his fingernails through his gloves. Keith grit his teeth. The smugness shrouding Lance was a thick as a blanket and ripe to be pierced by the tip of Keith’s blade. Every half-hearted shot he sent fizzling in Keith’s direction seemed to hold a levity that he could parse. Lance didn’t seem spiteful, but there was a deliberateness to his aim, a point he was trying to make, one that he kept hitting within ten centimetres of Keith’s body.

Keith rolled to the side as another spitting ball of light rocketed towards where he was crouched. Lance had been given a training weapon to use; lasers, not projectiles, non-lethal, but they packed a serious punch and left Keith's skin smarting whenever the fire connected.

"I'm getting bored!" Lance called across the deck. Loudly. 

That was a facet of the boy that Keith was beginning to notice the more they interacted. For all the effort Lance had made to avoid talking to Keith, now that they were being forced to partner up it was as though a dam had broken. Lance was  _ loud.  _ There was not a opportunity he missed to lorde his expertise of Keith’s head like a crown. And always accompanied by a laugh, short and sharp and full of white teeth.

"You're meant to be helping me!" Keith snapped as he dodged Lance's follow up round of fire.

The shooter in question made a show of yawning, his back pulling into a scimitar arch. "You've gotta learn what NOT to do, first."

"That it NOT how you teach!"

"Correction: That is very much how  _ I _ teach."

"Lance!" Orok's voice snaked across the room, snagging Lance's trigger finger for a moment. "Stop teasing him. You have a job to do."

The irritation Keith felt was like needles threading underneath his skin, and he gripped the naked handle of his blade that much tighter.

He'd been doing well in training, he knew he had. And here was Lance, shooting so close to him that he could feel the hairs on his skin lift with the electrostatic charge from the lasers. He didn't even look like he was trying all that hard.

The thought made Keith want to throw something.

The feeling made Keith look down at the dagger in his hand.

Lance was lifting his rifle again, the barrel lining up with Keith as the trigger lined up with his smirk. The corner of his mouth lifted enough for Keith to see his pointy canines.

Before Keith could doubt himself, he dived to the side, the resounding shot sailing a mile over his head before he hiked his arm back and threw the dagger as close as he could to Lance's achilles. The tall boy yelped, snatching his foot away from where the offending weapon dug into the floor, dark and jagged as a bolt of lightning. The movement threw him so far off balance that his hip connected with the ground in a way that looked both hysterical and uncomfortable. 

Keith sprinted forwards at the opportunity, dropped into a slide and swiping the dagger out of its cradle in the training deck floor before rolling to his feet. Behind him, he heard Lance spit out a swear, a rough and distinctly Galran noise that Keith would bet equated to 'fuck'.

Using the momentum of his roll, Keith pulled his dagger in a sharp crescent to face his opponent. He felt the weapon spark to life beneath his fingers, a burst of light signalling its transformation.

The same burst of light that briefly blinded him to the blade Lance had pulled from his belt. The two weapons bit into each other with an angry yell of clashing metal, and Keith found himself face to face with Lance. The other boy wore an expression that would have been menacing, were it not for the jut of his lower lip that devolved his entire face into little more than an annoyed pout.

The proximity lasted a few ticks before Orok called over again, "Ok, that's enough! That was really good work Keith!"

Keith felt the pressure on his blade release recklessly, and he tipped forward suddenly with the absence. When he straightened, he eyes drew up the full form of Lance standing in front of him, still looking vaguely pissed. They reached the crown of his head, made their way back down, and then paused at the blade in Lance's hand.

It was not the onyx grey of the luxite blades they all carried, though it was similar in shape. Instead, it curved in a pale wave of deadly looking mercury, bright and gleaming as a star. It might as well have been bent into the shape of a question mark; Keith felt the blade carve the curious shape of punctuation into his mind anyway. There wasn’t a Galra on this base that didn’t carry their blade with them wherever they went, be it strapped to their backs or their hips or sometimes even their thighs. There were blades cluttering the table tops in the mess hall whenever the troops broke for meal times. They were stapled to the soldiers lives as much as their were to the name of their crusade.

Before he even thought about it, Keith was blurting, "Where's your blade?"

Lance looked at him sharply, his eyes as shiny as his weapon and more than half as sinister.

"Very funny," he growled in a voice that didn't match up with the childish pout of his mouth.

Confusion tilted Keith's head to the side.

"That wasn't a joke."

Lance's infantile pout twisted into something sour and unhappy, and he turned away from Keith as he tucked the long saracen snugly back into his belt.

There was an invisible tether between the two actions, one that Keith had somehow become tangled in, and he and Lance moved in one motion; Keith stepping forward as the taller boy stepped away. A wave of frustration dug into Keith's ribs like a splinter, and he could feel it twisting below his skin, somewhere close to his gut.

Lance had made a face like this before, twice, though less severe, and both times it had been in reaction to something Keith had said.

It looked as though Lance wanted to retort, but his tongue was crushing the words against the roof of his mouth before they ever made it to his lips. Keith couldn't understand why he didn't say anything - The Galra seemed to favour a direct approach when it came to social situations, a trait that Keith believed he shared, and so Lance's stubborn silence served only to provoke the spark of impatience that Keith had been training so hard to quell.

"Have you done much hand-to-hand?" Lance asked suddenly.

He didn't turn towards Keith as he spoke, instead making himself busy with putting his weapons down on a small shelf protruding from the wall.

"Yeah, a lot, actually," Keith replied. "It's pretty much all we do right now. We've barely even started training with our blades yet."

Lance let out a short breath that might have been a laugh, and Keith dug his eyes into the back of Lance's neck.

"Yeah, it sucks. But you have to have control of your body before you start wielding an extension of it," Lance told him calmly.

It was by far the most casually Lance had ever spoken to him, Keith thought. A simple, matter-of-fact statement that lacked any varnish of sarcasm or hostility.

"How long did it take you?" Keith asked.

Lance looked over his shoulder at him, eyebrows raised quizzically.

"How long did it take me to do what?"

"To start training with your blade?"

And all at once, the wave of peace had broken, and Lance's glare was the spiky reef that Keith felt himself rocking over. He watched as Lance peeled his eyes away to look down at the long silver blade in his grasp. The pad of his thumb caressed the edge of it, tracing the length of the curve all the way up to the tip where it PRESSED. Keith could see the way the skin depressed at the violent intrusion even from across the room. He was sure that if Lance pushed his thumb any harder against it, the blade would skewer the digit.

"Longer than I wanted," Lance said quietly.

Keith glanced down at his own blade.

It wasn't a light object, by any means: It was impossible for all that extra metal to appear out of nothing, and so when it was a dagger, it was simply a compression of the luxite atoms.

But when Keith had finally unwrapped the long strip of grubby cloth from the hilt, he had also been liberating the burden of his secret, had felt it strip away with every coil he unwound from the handle. He sent a silent PUSH of will into the blade, and in a muted shine of light, it reverted back into its dagger form, still the same weight, just compact.

He noticed then that Lance was watching him. There was a strange expression on his face as his blue eyes clung to the dagger in Keith's hold. It wasn't a large expression; a simple drooping of the corners of his mouth, a minute pinch between his eyebrows. But the look in his eyes was ravenous.

"Doing some hand to hand combat?" Orok asked them.

Keith blinked as the spindly Galra appeared. He still wasn't used to the way Orok moved. The length of his limbs seemed disproportionate despite the strength Keith knew he held, and his long gangly lope made him look more supernatural than alien.

It was because of these things that Keith hadn't notice him sidling up to the two of them, spindly as a spider and just as quiet.

"If Keith thinks he's up to it," Lance stated simply, turning to shoot Keith a challenging smirk.

Keith squared his shoulders. He did not break Lance's gaze.

"Ready when you are."

  
  


**

 

Keith wasn’t entirely sure what he’d been expecting.

Fighting with Lance hand to hand was one of the less graceful experiences in a life already short on grace. What he had expected was for Lance to fight with a certain restraint bred from mastery of a skill. He’d seen Lance in training before: The boy was fast, quicker than you’d predict from someone of his proportions. The length of his limbs should have made him slower, more adept at offense than dodging. And yet he performed the latter with apparent ease, his body moving in sweeping arcs so rapid that they practically looked like speedlines. Keith had been keen to fight him one on one, so that he might study Lance’s precision up close.

That wasn’t how Lance fought him now.

The boy was nothing less than a violent windmill, all his tactful evasion and pinpoints strikes evaporating into a style of fighting that was all impulse and no control. It allowed Keith to get a few good hits in; he was sure Lance had earned some impressive bruises along his ribs.

For all his squandered skill, Lance served Keith a rather vicious uppercut that nearly had the dark-haired boy biting through his tongue. It was at this point that Orok  stepped in rather forcefully suggested that Keith go to the archive to study his Galran heritage a little more. He said it with a smile on his face that could have withered a flower. Keith knew arguing would get him nowhere, Orok had made a point of it. That didn’t stop him from throwing Lance an icy glare as he stalked out of the training room.

He trawled the hallways at a snail’s pace, one hand rubbing the angry red welt that was pushing its way onto his jaw. The toes of his boots dragged against the ground; they still wanted to stay on the training deck where Lance was undoubtedly crushing the butt of a rifle into his shoulder, lining up a shot he was sure to hit.

There was the additional draw back that Keith had next to no clue where he was going. He held a vague notion of the general direction of the archive, but it only took passing a particular chip in the wall to tell him he was heading completely the wrong way.

He was spared the burden of traipsing the halls with a bruised jaw by a tentative call of his name passing by.

"Keith?"

Keith paused, turning his head towards the person.

Eshka stared at him, eyes drifting over his hunched form. She lingered on the fingers cupping Keith's jaw, and he peeled them away as if keeping them there might drawn more unwanted attention. He only realised belatedly that in doing so, he had put the point of assault on display. Eshka smirked as her eyes traced over it.

"Seems like someone got to you in training."

Keith refused to rise to the bait on matter of principle.

"I'm looking for the archive," he stated dumbly.

Eshka's smirk only widened, carving a thick trench up her cheek. Keith had thought that Orok was the master of mischief amongst the Blades, but it was times like this that made him think twice. Orok was outwardly impish, his brand of chaos was loud and fractured like a hurricane.

Eshka was a wolf in sheep's clothing.

"It's this way," she told him with an incline of her head. "I'm actually headed there myself if you'd like to accompany me."

"Yeah, thanks," Keith responded, and he fell into step beside her.

The silence settled between them was comfortable to begin with. However, every step closer to the library seemed to add another grain of expectancy to when they would inevitably talk. Eshka shot several sidelong glances at Keith; she was clearly waiting for him to lead the conversation. The next glance at his jaw informed Keith exactly what she wanted him to talk about.

Galra custom dictated that there would be no avoiding the topic, and so when Keith stubbornly stayed silent, Eshka said, "You'll want to put some xorak gel on that. Brings out bruising."

Keith merely grunted in response. He may not be able to stop Eshka from probing, but that didn't mean he lacked the capacity to control his input in the conversation. It was in vain though, since not a dobash later, Eshka asked, “Lance give you that shiner, then?”

Keith looked away before realising his mistake; there was confirmation in aversion, and Eshka looked like she’d just won a prize.

“You seen Irez today?” Keith countered.

Eshka’s grin slipped from her face like wet paint, and she patched over it with a half hearted scowl.

“You haven’t even met her,” she muttered in a low tone.

“I don’t need to. Just mentioning her name has you quaking like a snarfblag.”

Eshka growled at him, yellow eyes flashing like headlights. It was the same type of growl Keith had been hearing for weeks on the Marmoran base. It always sounded more threatening than the person behind it, and so Keith barely thought twice about the quickfire tighten and release from behind his throat. A rasping noise made it all the way up to his mouth before it stopped behind his teeth. Eshka stopped in her tracks, eyebrows lifted with bemusement.

After a moment, she said, “I didn’t know you could chuff.”

Keith shrugged. “Hollo taught me.”

The explanation seemed satisfying enough for Eshka, as she simply gave him an appraising look before continuing on towards the library.

It was a trait of her personality that Keith appreciated greatly. Whilst Orok seemed intent on digging as far into people as he could before hitting a nerve, Eshka seemed to swing in the opposite direction. She was content with however much people wanted to share, and didn’t shy away from silence. They were opposite directions on the swing of a pendulum, it was no wonder they were often partnered. There was a balance between their characteristics that walked a knife edge and yet somehow never slipped, resulting in a dangerous equilibrium. Keith was just glad he’d stumbled upon the less intrusive of the two ends of the spectrum, he could only imagine how far Orok would chip into him if he’d been in this hallway instead.

Together, Eshka walked side by side with Keith into the archives.

Keith desperately wanted to call it a library. It held stacks of volumes piled all the way to the ceiling, filed both categorically and alphabetically. One look at it and Keith’s mind had been rather insistent about the name for such a place. But the few times he’d called it ‘the library’ had been greeted with stares of confusion or even outright offense. It seemed The Blades were rather insistent about their name for such a place, too.

Eshka strolled through the parallel stacks. She seemed confident about where she was going, even though they were winding towards a more remote area of the room, right towards the back. As they reached the final stack in the corner, right where the books brushed up against the wall, Eshka slotted her taloned fingers between two fat volumes and clawed them aside to reveal a small box sat behind them. She winked at Keith before dipping her hand into it and gingerly withdrawing a slim book. 

Keith watched as she flicked to somewhere just beyond the middle, pressing her back up against the wall and sliding down to sit cross-legged. In doing so, she turned the cover of the book in his direction. The splash of colours across the front were faded, but they boasted a richness and saturation that had been lost through love and use. The hues were a complimentary set of reds and pinks, brushing together the image of a Galran woman with her arms wound around male Galra, his hands gripping her hips as they-

“Oh my god!” Keith yelped, feeling every single type of conflicting emotion he’d ever felt at once. “You have romance novels in here?” 

Eshka shot him a glare that could have peeled paint.

“Announce it to the entire base, why don’t you, Keith?” she hissed.

Keith curled away from her with embarrassment. There were so many things about the Blade of Marmora that he was failing to reconcile, and this latest development could only tangle things further. It was strangely disconcerting to find out about all the personalised nuances within the rebel base, like the image of the Blades in Keith’s mind was changing colour the more he learned about them. There was something distinctly human about their private actions and thoughts, and it made the threat of war feel greater, hungrier, more eager to sink its teeth into people and tear them away from their individual quirks.

“Not many people know they’re here,” Eshka whispered, glancing around furtively for eavesdroppers. Keith had no doubt she would neutralize anyone who even attempted to sneak up on her.

“I didn’t realise the Galra were so scandalous,” Keith teased, leaning up against the stack facing Eshka, a smirk twisting the corner of his mouth.

Now that the initial shock had worn off, the idea of sneaking romantic novellas seemed hilariously immature.

“We like sex,” Eshka said baldly. “Most of us, anyway, not all. It’s natural, we just don’t get a lot of time for it.”

She paused for a moment, her nose scrunching as she squinted at something on the page.

“Also, I can’t stand the gossip.”

Keith arched an eyebrow as another thread wove itself into the colour tapestry that was the Galran race.

“Gossip?”

“Yes.  _ Gossip, _ ” Eshka spat the word like an expletive. “You can always smell who’s been together.”

The knowledge made Keith feel strangely warm. Something behind his ribs recoiled.

“That’s… Wow. Invasive,” he stammered.

Eshka hummed in agreement, her lips pressing together hard.

“So if you and Irez…” Keith let the end of the sentence speak itself. 

Eshka visibly tensed, but didn’t miss a beat as she countered, “So if you can Lance…”

Keith jolted.

“What? No.  _ No.  _ Lance hates me.”

"What makes you think that?" Eshka asked without looking up from her book. 

One clawed finger flicked the edge of a page, and her ears twiched at the sharp ragged sound of it. Keith released a breath through his teeth, dredging forward all his encounters with Lance since arriving at the base. He lifted a hand to rub tenuously at his forehead, as if by doing so he may be able to sort through some of the muddy memories.

He thought of Lance's voice behind the door to Kolivan's office, pleading for a way to get Keith off the base. He thought of how Lance had let himself be shielded by the wall of Antok's braun whenever Keith stepped within a twenty foot radius of him, of the razor smart glances and the whip smart jibes and the strange uneven tension that fell between the cracks of both.

 

“He’s weirdly competitive.” Keith settled on. It was still the truth, even if it didn’t encompass all the tiny fractals of Lance that would embed themselves under Keith’s skin. “It’s like he thinks I’m trying to take his spot as ‘best half human’ or whatever.”

Eshka slowly lowered the book she’d been reading, peering over the top of it to fix Keith with a gaze that was both concerned and judgemental. It was an odd expression. Keith refused to shuffle underneath it.

Suddenly, her face cleared, yellow eyes turning round with wonder.

“You don’t know,” she murmured.

“Know what?”

“Lance isn’t Galra.”

The urge to roll his eyes was so strong that Keith had to momentarily close his eyelids to keep from seeming facetious.

“Yeah, I know. He’s half human, like me.”

“No, you don’t know,” Eshka repeated. She very calmly put her book down and closed it in her lap. “Lance is human. Completely human.”

There was a gap between Keith listening to the words and him actually hearing them. In the same way that there is a gap between knowing something and being told, Keith felt every syllable spill from Eshka’s lips, slow and thick as tar, and they seemed to hang in the air in a freakish stasis as they crawled towards his ears. He felt them sink in, finally, somewhere behind his cerebral cortex in a slippery, loose sort of way, failing to hook onto any one emotion. 

His jaw worked independently of his head, loosening lip a puppet as his throat wheezed out the word, “What?”

To her credit, Eshka didn’t even appear to be wrestling against a smile. She looked like an oil painting, her face perfectly smoothed into impassiveness as she watched Keith fold into himself, unfold, and then refold into a different expression.

“Where-” Keith’s mouth went one direction as his brain moved in the other, and so he tripped over his lips as he struggled to catch up to the latter. “He- I don’t understand.  _ How?  _ How did he get here? _ ” _

Eshka took pity on him, saving Keith the embarrassment of fighting his own tongue. She told him, “Lance has been part of the Blade for about eight decaphoebes. I think? He was already here when I arrived.”

Keith processed the information with all the smoothness of a flour mill grinding wheat. He scraped past the knowledge of Lance’s heritage, diverting his attention towards the wider canal of what Eshka was supplying.

“How long have you been here,” he asked her. His voice sounded strangely hoarse.

“About three decaphoebes,” she answered. “I think only about half the Blade remember a time when Lance wasn’t here. Jaussey definitely would.” She added the last part more to herself, picking at the cover of the book with the edge of one claw.

Keith sifted through her words a little more thoroughly this time. About half the Blade was a little over a hundred Galran warriors, but not by much. He didn’t want to think about whether that was because the rebellion was spread so think and hidden so covertly, or if it was because they kept losing so many members.

“I’ve… I’ve gotta go,” Keith muttered.

He could feel Eshka’s eyes on him like a physical weight, one that stayed pinned to the back of his head, tugging at his dark locks as he turned and fled the archives. Keith didn’t know his way back to the training room, of course. But his haste was already pushing his legs onto a dangerous trajectory, and somewhere distantly in his mind held the hope that he’d simple stumble upon it if he simply burned through enough raw impulse. Every step forward physically felt like a step back mentally as Keith began putting the fragments of clues together at a shuddering pace. Every conversation he’d had that featured the title “average human”, every instance in which the blades had questioned things about Lance that had been inevitabilities for themselves. Keith slotted them all together to tessellate a picture of startling clarity.

_ “You’re half Galra?” _

Keith had misinterpreted the challenge in Lance’s eyes back then, his blue irises flashing like a crackle of electricity. He hadn’t been squaring up to Keith. He’d been  _ defensive. _

_ “What’s it to you?” _

It was sheer dumb luck that Keith rounded the corner and nearly walked smack into the one person he’d been trying to find. The two lines they’d exchanged that evening had been knocking back and forth between the walls of Keith’s skull like a ping pong game in crisis, and they flung themselves across his mind with renewed rapidity as Keith’s feet rooted him in place at the sight of the other boy. Lance, for all his quick reflexes and training in stealth, looked little more than startled at Keith’s explosive appearance, which had the effect of making the loud yelp he admitted look rather staged. 

“Jeez, dude, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” he breathed, some of the tension oozing out of his bunched muscles. He flashed a cocky grin, blue eyes glinting hard and bright as sapphire. “Trying to get the jump on me? Hate to tell you, but you’re gonna have to do better than that. I could hear you stomping from a mile off.”

In one ear, Keith could hear himself asking Lance about being half Galra. In the other, he could hear Lance’s snippy response. In between both, Keith’s  mouth dropped out the words, “You’re human,” and Lance’s mouth dropped his smile.

Carefully, like he was tiptoeing around a bomb, Lance said, “... Yeah?”

He wasn’t quite meeting Keith’s eyes, choosing instead to look at something just over the shorter boy’s shoulder. It was like he was trying to project himself into that space, just shy of where the dark hair curled around Keith’s ear, a little pocket of hidden space where he could escape the conversation. 

“You’re from Earth,” Keith continued. “Right?”

“Yeah,” Lance said again, a little stronger. “I am.”

He still wouldn’t meet Keith’s gaze. As if the truth there was too big and swollen, threatening to become visible the moment he looked at it for too long. Keith was a true mirror of this; he couldn’t take his eyes off Lance, searching for something that might explain how the tall boy came to be at the base, a tinge of purple in the soft skin below his eyes, a shade of yellow paling his sclera, a story in the laughter lines around his eyes, anything.

“I have so many questions,” Keith breathed, and out with the statement came a piece of his soul, naked and vulnerable as his past was shrouded and armoured.

Keith felt like he was barely looking at a person anymore. Lance could be the missing link to his past. A boy from Earth floating through the cosmos, and Keith, a child whose heart stretched towards the stars bound to the dirt and dry dust of the desert.

Lance just watched him warily. The tension from his surprise earlier was bleeding back into body like oil. Keith wouldn’t put it past him to try and fight his way out of the situation.

“How are you here?” Keith blurted, opening the floodgates with one swift kick to the throat. “Where were you until you came to the headquarters? How are you a part of the Blade of Marmora? You’re not even Galra.”

The last question seemed to snap something in Lance. Like Keith had plugged him into a live socket, Lance jolted, taking a literal step back as he crumpled into himself like paper. His glare was searing.

“I’m more Galra than you,” he growled. “I’ve earned my place here. I didn’t just get in on some blood oath.”

Lance words barely registered, only brushing past Keith’s thoughts as he spilled another question into the space between them.“Is that why you don’t have a blade?”

Lance looked like he was ready to slap him.

“Why don’t you just mind your own business, Keith?” he snapped, turning to leave.

Keith was all itch and so he didn’t think twice about reaching up to scratch his fingers towards Lance’s shoulder. Contrastingly, Lance was all scratch, and so he didn’t even hesitate to grab Keith’s wrist and flip him over his shoulder. 

Keith’s back connected with the floor in harsh, blunt force as the straight lines of the corridors moved jaggedly with his vision. He felt his lungs jump a little in his chest with the impact, and he wheezed out a cough as he connected with the metal.

“What’s going on here?”

Kolivan’s voice was a sturdy beacon to latch onto as Keith’s world continued to spin in lazy rotations. He tilted his head back to see the image of the upside down Galra frowning at him. Even from this angle, Keith could decipher the look of immeasurable distaste that sat across his scarred features. Looming behind him like a dark shadow was Antok, lips curling upwards just enough to reveal his pointy fangs. His eyes were latched onto Keith like fishing hooks.

“I was just showing Keith some moves that he might have missed in training,” Lance near sang.

He released his bruising grip on Keith’s arm, but didn’t offer a hand up, instead stepping away, a little closer to Antok. Keith moved to roll to his feet when another hand presented itself in front of his nose. He glanced up to see Kolivan bent at the waist, arm outstretched and face impassive. Keith took the hand, letting the leader pull him upright, but not before he’d gotten a glance at the corners of Lance’s mouth twisting down into something sour as his eyes rested on their joined palms.

“Thanks,” Keith mumbled. Kolivan simply nodded.

“It’s fortunate we came across you when we did,” he told Keith, all business as usual. “We’ve received a call on the emergency frequency.”

Keith frowned when Kolivan didn’t elaborate. The Blades talked in half sentences, he was discovering. It left him with the impression that he was meant to work out the rest for himself. 

It was a feeling that wasn’t dissimilar to defeat when he had to ask, “What does this have to do with me?”

Kolivan lowered his chin to peer down at Keith, his yellow eyes inscrutable.

“We received a hail on the emergency frequency,” he revealed. “From the Castle of Lions.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooooooooh someone's in troubleeeeee
> 
> I found out that Voltron is apparently the slow burn fandom? Well let me tell you my good bitch. I am gonna take that to a whole new level. Gonna milk that harder than a Kaltenecker, my guy, just u wait
> 
> As always, HUGE thank you to Ami for being the best beta reader in the world <33


	3. Maroon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In answering Voltron's distress call, Keith and Lance end up staying on the Castle of Lions for longer than they thought. The new interactions bring out a side of Lance that Keith can't help but notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey hey hey everyone
> 
> So I think this is the longest chapter I've ever written in my life. Remember when I said I wasn't gonna overwhelm people with 30k+ updates? Cuz I sure don't lol. Thank god for April nanowrimo, otherwise it would fully be another 3 months til I got this out.
> 
> Massive shout out to my incredible beta readers, Froggy, Angel, Kai, and always the wonderful Ami <33 You all helped me so much with sorting this chapter out!! And also to all the sprinters that motivated me to write. MVPs each and every one!
> 
> Lyrics at the beginning are from "U" by Mikky Ekko. I consider it this fic's anthem because the lyrics are so spot on.

_Show me what it means to take it slowly_

_  
Friendship into love takes growing _

_  
Knowing it's a long long road to love _

 

***

 

There were only a handful of things in Keith's life that had developed automatic responses.

His time living in the shack had made him a light sleeper, his ears attuned to the soft patter of rain and the threatening creak of wood, even when his conscious mind had called it a day. His father's death had made him twitchy around an open flame, as though the spark held a personal vendetta against him. Displays of kindness had made him a guarded, feral creature, ready to snap his jaws at anyone who extended a hand in comfort.

Or so had been the case until he'd met Shiro. The hand that had been extended was patient. Cautious when Keith snarled and lashed out towards him, but persistent with a steady kind of assurance that Keith yearned to latch on to with a depth that his trust did not extend to.

It had taken time for them to come together, months even. And those were months that Keith could admit had been eaten up by him alone. But come together they had, and Keith felt like a coin that Shiro had flipped onto its shiny side. His mistrust had been buffed into loyalty, his dents and scars polished into something that shined with raw talent. His snapping jaws had been filed into fierce relief.

And it was this relief that flooded Keith's veins like a near Pavlovian response as Shiro's face filled the large holoscreen in the briefing room. His shock of white hair hung between his brows like a spectre, nearly blending with the ashen colour that his skin had paled to through the pixels. Even through the transmission, Keith could see a bruise shadowing the cut of his jaw, a string bead of blood blooming from a graze on his cheekbone. Keith's vast relief was quickly cooling into worry.

"Black Paladin," Kolivan greeted him, tone cut and clear as his posture.

"Kolivan," Shiro responded. His eyes travelled over the Galra's shoulder to land on Keith, his expression relaxing a notch at the edges. "Keith."

The name was breathed so gently that Keith felt it brush feather light against his heart.

"Shiro, what's going on?"

"We could use some help on this mission," Shiro's tone dropped back into line, his military training coming through his voice. "We got a tip about a Galra vessel transporting prisoners through this arm of the galaxy. There's not enough time to get everyone out."

Keith opened his mouth to respond, when he felt Lance step up beside him. Keith turned his head as the a familiar purple glow caught the edge of his vision, and he turned to see Lance's mask in full place, painting him as nothing more than another foot soldier. The moment allowed Kolivan to answer first.

"I remind you that the Blade of Marmora is a stealth organisation," he stated, voice flat. "We do not have the resources to spare for a simple rescue mission."

Keith knew his brother well enough to recognise the exact moment the words telegraphed. It was the way they grey of his eyes hardened into sharp flint, eager to ignite. For all the ways they were different, Keith and Shiro shared much of the same code. And it was moments like this where they were a dangerous couple. There were few things that made Shiro angry, but unwillingness to help was one of them, and it was a sentiment Keith aligned with. Shiro was the spark, Keith was gasoline, and he watched as the Black Paladin's lip peeled back mirror the feeling of his own. Beside him, Lance's head turned towards Kolivan, his chin lifting a good inch higher.

"It's not just a rescue mission!"

The camera shifted suddenly and Pidge's face filled the screen, the rims of her glasses glinting where they bracketed her amber eyes.

"There's intel on that vessel that could lead you to hundreds of Galran outposts. They're full of blueprints, guard patrol schedules, weapon shipments, everything," Pidge's mouth twisted at the corner in muted triumph. "They could help you take back a huge portion of this sector."

To Keith's left, Kolivan flicked one ear. It was the only indicator that he'd acknowledged Pidge's words at all. His face remained astoundingly impassive. It made Keith want to roar from somewhere deep behind his ribs.

"Kolivan," Lance's voice cut the silence of the room, thick and warped from behind the mask. "It's intel we could use."

Kolivan's ear twitched again as he levelled Lance with a weighty look. Keith felt that stare hang between them like a metal cable, sagging in the centre, right where Keith stood between them.  The silence surrounding them made it drag on the ground, and Keith flared, eager to start the fire.

"There are people that need our help!" he barked.

If he'd been yelling at a statue, he might have provoked more of a response. Kolivan's face remained infuriatingly impassive as his stare glided over Keith snarling in his face. The former paladin took a stride towards him and had to stop because one of his arms had been left behind. He turned his head to see where the limb had snagged, only to realise that it had been captured by its own kind. The fingers of Lance's hand, long and spindly even in their gloves, formed a perfect halo around Keith's forearm. He could feel his skin glowing where they touched, suspended before the inferno could exhale out of him. Lance didn’t say anything, but even through the mask, Keith could feel those cool blue eyes watching him. He briefly considered shaking free of Lance’s hold, the thought flitting through his mind like a wisp of smoke, but it vanished as the fingers caging his arm coiled a little tighter and then loosened. The grip was fluttering in strange increments of pressure, and Keith realised that Lance was trembling imperceptibly. Keith let his arm go slack and it caused a chain reaction through his entire body, his shoulders slumping and his lips slipped back over his teeth, sheathing them.

“Kolivan,” Lance said again, much softer than before.

The leader surveyed him for a long moment. The yellow of his eyes seemed matte, barely reflecting the light from the hologram. Every tick the silence stretched on beat against Keith’s nerves like a hammer beating out chords from inside a piano.

“Very well,” Kolivan finally spoke.

Keith released a breath between his teeth, hissing his relief out onto the bridge. Lance’s hand slipped from his forearm, and Keith leaned back on his heels as he chased the weight of it. He was only vaguely aware he’d done so when he took a step backwards into Lance’s space, and even then, it wasn’t a realisation he thought to dwell on. The urgency etched into the fold of Shiro’s brow brought far more pressing ideas into focus.

“We will deploy a small team to extract the intel. Send us your coordinates. We will rejoin at the Castle of Lions for debriefing.”

“The prisoners-”

The words had barely left Shiro’s tongue before Kolivan stepped on them.

“Voltron will transport the prisoners alone.”

The statement had Keith snatching back the step he’d retracted. He distantly expected Lance to grab his arm again, but the boy took a stride longer than Keith’s and succeeded in planting himself squarely in front of him.

“We can help get people out.” Lance’s voice was as firm as the set of Kolivan’s jaw. “Send Regris and Vrek to get the intel. Me and Keith can help the prisoners.”

Kolivan regarded Lance for a long moment. There was a tightness to the corners of his eyes that Keith hadn’t seen before. Superficially, it seemed like he was displeased with the challenge. But as Lance stood firm, his stance unwavering with his conviction, Keith watched as Kolivan’s brows tipped down at the sides, tainting his entire expression with poorly concealed worry. The whole bridge had ground to a halt with the challenge, and the stalemate sat badly on Keith’s shoulders.

“I know I’m new,” he spoke up when the weight of the tension became distasteful. “But I’m a former Paladin of Voltron. I have experience helping retrieve prisoners.”

He stepped up next to Lance, the two of them forming a dual challenge that had Kolivan’s mouth twisting.

“We’ll leave the extraction to Regris and Vrek,” Keith continued. “We can help.”

Kolivan was not an ungenerous man. Keith had seen him dedicate nothing short of his life to the cause of protecting the universe. And so his reluctance to provide aid was balanced only by the understanding that whilst the Blades were a strong resource, they were also tangibly finite. This was a truth that Kolivan understood intimately, and so whilst it didn’t excuse his hardness, it did explain it. Even so, Keith knew he wasn’t going to stand down, and Lance showed no sign of cowering away from the argument either. This was another truth that Kolivan seemed to understand, and so he sighed, short and terse, and he pulled up a blueprint hologram of standard military ship schematics.

“Just you two. Leave the intel to the others.”

It was a clipped statement. Kolivan may not have been able to change their minds but he was still their leader, and he was the most experienced of them all.

 

***

 

Keith had only ridden in a Blade ship once before, and it had been when he’d left the Castle of Lions.

He remembered how it had looked, regal and pale as fingers as its towers arched upwards to grasp the stars. It had felt as though Keith could reach his hand towards it and snatch it right out of the cosmos to cradle it to his breast if he’d let himself. But he’d let the castle shrink into just another speck of space dust, indiscernible from the pinpricks of light surrounding it. It was like he’d left a heart shaped piece of himself behind, floating out there in the universe, cold and alone. But it had been the right thing to do, and that conviction had hardened around Keith’s heart like blunt bronze.

This time, the sight of the castle ship cleaved that metal shield in two. Even in the shadow of an enormous Galra frigate, the Castle of Lions chipped a flagrant dent of brightness in the inky darkness of space. Keith felt his heart surge in his chest, rushing forward as it recognised what used to be called home.

The scene before the Marmoran ship wasn’t quite chaos, but then Keith felt he should take a moment to reevaluate what chaos looked like now that his scale of measurement had been rather laboriously expanded. Before he’d been ejected into the middle of a millenia old space war, chaos had been a child, burnt eggs in a too small kitchen whilst the doorbell rang. After, chaos had matured into the face of a soldier, wide eyed and gaping as Keith watched the life drain out of their eyes, realising that there was no time to do anything but move on.

From out of the faceted windows of their ship, Keith could count as many as ten escape pods fleeing the cruiser, and at least double that number of Galran fighter jets in hysterical pursuit. They buzzed about the pods in the unison of scourge of mosquitoes, singular spacecrafts somersaulting above and below in shrill randomness. Artificially piloted ships never possessed the same finesse of those driven by skilled individuals. Their style lended itself more to quantity than quality: Fire enough lasers and you’re sure to hit something eventually.

Keith’s fingers twitched where they sat on his knee, curling chaotically towards the hilt of his knife. Next to him, Lance sat with his mask pulled high and his hood pulled low. He would have been the picture of composition had it not been for his knee bouncing in place faster than a jackhammer.

Vrek pulled himself to his feet, supporting himself on the pilot’s seat with one hand as he leaned forward to peer at the myriad in front of them.

“There,” he pointed one clawed glove at a small divot in the cruiser. “That’s our entrance point.”

Keith leaned forward to catch a glimpse over his shoulder of a small pocket just below the ship’s hull. It gasped wide enough for them to skip over from the Marmoran ship without risking being seen by the rest of the fleet.

The Blade piloting the spacecraft swooped in a wide low arc below the great frigate, drawing in close as the tiny ship veered sideways and aligned itself with the entry. Regris shimmied open the back door with a stern press of his hand against the electronic panel. Keith had just risen to his feet when a hand pressed firmly between his shoulder blades.

“You go after Vrek,” Lance told him. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

Keith nodded, moving to step forward. A hand hooked over his shoulder, holding him in place as long fingers reached around his jaw to tap just below his ear. The Marmoran mask folded over his face like water, rippling mirrors that distorted and settled once again.

“Thanks,” he muttered.

“Wouldn’t want you to turn into a freeze pop on your first mission.”

Lance said the words like a joke, but his tone was brittle. Field experience could be gained in spades but nerves of steel could still melt under the heat of battle, and though Lance stood proud and tall, the trimming down of his characteristic gesticulation was more telling than his stance. Keith felt a soft thrill run hot between his skin and his suit as he felt the tug of the space vacuum around his torso. He gave Vrek a moment to cross the gap between them and the cruiser before stepping forward and launching his body into space. The leap couldn’t have lasted more than two ticks, but even after a year of space travel, Keith’s stomach still dropped with the anticipation of gravity that would not come. His feet scuffed the dark metallic surface as he landed on the cruiser, body catching up to his fallen gut as he braced the rest of his weight with his hands. Lance landed next to him a tick later with a hollow thump. The eyes of his mask stared ghoulish and empty as he turned to face Keith. One hand disappeared into a pouch strapped to his calf, and he dug out what looked like a laser pen. A distorted hiss flushed itself through the comms as Lance stabbed it into the chipped metal of the ship and carved out a healthy sized ‘O’, big enough for them to fit through in single file. Regris went first, hooking his claws into either sides of the hole and catapulting his body through. Vrek followed before Keith pulled himself through the space. As he’d said, Lance followed them, bringing up the rear of their mottley chain of infiltrators. Keith stuck as close as he could to the way Vrek writhed through the vents, half crawling half clawing his way through the labyrinthine bowels of the cruiser. Without such appendages, Keith had to settle for a less graceful scuffle as his gloved hands pressed for purchas against the flat metal encasing them.

There was a heavy shudder of movement accompanied by an abrupt huff at his feet, and Keith turned his head as much as he could manage to spy Lance’s glowing eyes staring at him. Even the flat planes of the mask held an air of impatience.

“What?” Keith blurted.

Lance poked him in the ankle. “You’re slow.”

Keith jiggled his foot, trying to kick Lance’s hand away. He got as far as stubbing his toe before giving up, his front teeth chipping together behind his mask.

“Well if you’d like to go ahead of me, then by all means,” he growled sourly.

Ahead of them Regris hissed a short, “Shut up.”

Lance scoffed, “Oh like they can hear us in the middle of a battle.”

“We’re accessing the main bridge, there’s going to be more soldiers there commanding the fleet. This mission will be successful providing we _don’t_ draw attention to ourselves.”

Keith heard Regris shift a few feet up the vent, and he lifted his head as a crack of light cleaved his mask.

“So if you two could cooperate for ten dobashes, then we can get out of here alive,” Regris finished with a chip in his voice that made it clear their cooperation wasn’t not a debate.

He punctuated his statement with a harsh kick to the vent he was crouched behind. It popped open with a metallic gasp, clattering into the corridor. Keith wanted to wince at the noise but the rhythmic booming of battle fire outside convinced him it would be in vain. He was proved right as he crept out the of the vent after Vrek; the corridors were bare of soldiers, the only proof of habitation was the way they sadly echoed the Blades footsteps back to them.

Regris pulled up a choppy hologram from his vambrace and wasting no time in sticking two claws into the middle of it. Keith recognised the pixelated schematics of the cruiser from the many times he’d seen them on the Castle Ship. It gave him a strange twinge in his chest to think that it was so close, barely spitting distance from where their quartet weaseled into the Galra cruiser, but Keith sat on that feeling hard enough to focus.

“This is where we are,” Regris told them, words stark with clear intent. He scraped a path through to the corner of the hologram as he continued, “This is the bridge where me and Vrek will gather the intel.”

His sharp claws cut a circle around the schematics as he jabbed them at the opposite corner.

“And this is where Voltron is escorting the prisoners. You two will head there once we’ve made contact with them.”

On cue, Vrek tapped his own vambrace, jolting several Galra numbers into their short holographic life. They crackled as they changed, a clear countdown.

He kept his eyes on them as he tapped a finger to one ear and said, “Patching comms through to Voltron in Five… Four… Three… Two-”

A shimmer of static popped and whistled in Keith’s ear louder than he expected. He started just as Shiro’s voice rang through the fitful line.

“-me in, Keith. Keith, are you there?”

“Shiro!” Keith cried, desperate to bite into the sound of his brother’s voice. “Shiro, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, buddy,” the smile in Shiro’s voice was audible, and a familiar bloom of relief sprang against Keith’s gut. “Where are you?”

Keith opened his mouth to answer at the same time Lance moved his hand to cover it. Long gloved fingers wrapped over Keith’s mask, and he glanced at Lance in irritation. The other boy pressed a finger to the base of his own mask where his lips would be.

“Black Paladin,” Regris’ voice assumed the authority of their mission, filling the silence Keith had left. “We cannot disclose our location at this time. We will be sending two Blades to you to aid the prisoners escape. Please inform us of your position.”

“Just off the port side,” Shiro stepped back into the voice of a leader. “Hunk and I are taking the last of the prisoners in Yellow and Black, but we could use a hand covering the rest of the escape pods. Do you think you could take out the remote piloting tech for the fighter jets?”

“Vrek and I will be infiltrating the main bridge, we will do what we can from there. I am sending the rest of our squad to help with the prisoners.”

“Thanks,” Shiro’s tone was breathy with relief. “Pidge is on the ship helping direct people to the Yellow Lion. Keith and Lance can meet her on the lower decks. Let me patch you through.”

There was a soft melody of beeps before it was injected with another cough of static as Pidge’s comm latched onto their frequency.

“Shiro, PLEASE tell me that’s my backup?”

Even through the tinny communicator, Pidge’s voice sounded strained and breathless. Keith’s heart stalled with a swoop of worry.

Shiro parroted, “That’s your backup, Pidge. They’ll meet you at the rendezvous. The Blades are gonna help us thin out the masses enough to get those escape pods through.”

Regris’s tail swished into an angry hook as he lifted his chin and said, “Bear in mind, Black Paladin, that our priority is gathering intel.”

Keith did not like injustice. It was an enemy he’d grappled with for years, and he refused to let it win, especially when it affected lives outside his own.

“Our priority should be helping save those people,” he barked at Regris.

The Galra stepped forward, shoulders lifting as he straightened his back. With his tail swishing behind him, he was the exact shape of inequality Keith was used to fighting against. His fingers curled with anticipation, itching to punch something.

“We better get to that then.”

Lance had already galloped a yard away before the words landed on Keith, and by the time the red paladin heard them, both boys had paused to stare at each other, Keith in bald surprise, Lance in bald impatience.

“You coming, Mullet?”

“What?”

The word was so outdated that Keith thought for a moment maybe Lance was speaking Galra. He only got to partially chew on it before having to skip after Lance or risk losing him around a corner. A loud rumble rocked itself through the breadth of the ship, making Keith stumble slightly. It sounded like an explosion from just outside the hull, and Keith could feel it vibrate through his toes. When he caught up to Lance and they fell into step beside each other, Lance cocked his head to glance his mask towards Keith.

“Oh, well look who decided to show up to the mission after all.”

Keith tugged absently at the back of his hood. His body had caught up to Lance but his mind was still a few steps behind ,and so the next thing he said was, “It’s not a mullet.”

Lance faced forwards again, his hood swallowing the glowing orbs of his mask.

“Short at the front. Long at the back. Sorry, Samurai, I don’t make the rules.”

“It’s short at the front so it doesn’t get in my eyes!”

“And long at the back so it doesn’t get past the eighties.”

Keith wanted to growl. He would’ve tried to as well, the thick rattle of it sitting round and squat in his throat ready to roll out across his tongue, were it not for the steady shake of Lance’s shoulders. They broke the dark silhouette of the boy next to him, blurring away some of the perfect soldier cookie cutter mould.

Cautiously, Keith asked, “Are you… laughing at me?”

“Keith!”

The sound of Pidge’s familiar voice pumped Keith’s heart with so much emotion and at such speed that he felt dizzy. He turned fast enough to glimpse a speck of green as Pidge collided with him bodily, her small arms constricting around his waist like a chain. He barely had a second to lower his hands onto her upper back when she shoved him harshly away.

“It’s great to see you but we’ve gotta move these prisoners out before the soldiers manage to get those doors open. Think you can buy us some time?”

Keith glanced down the hallway to where he could hear the sentries battering the door. The metal panels of it coughed out a boom with each impact, shuddering and creaking as they failed to contain the force behind them. He glanced back at Lance whose body was dropped low into a defensive stance, one hand strangling the hilt of his scimitar. It glinted like a smile in the purple lights of the corridor, and Lance cocked his head in a way that glinted like a smile too.

“I think we can manage that,” Keith told Pidge, his mouth curling into a confident smirk. “You go ahead and get the prisoners on board Yellow. We’ve got this.”

Pidge nodded at him with a grim smile, sparing him a hard cuff to the pauldron as she skipped past him down the hall. As she passed Lance, he saluted her with two fingers at his temple. Pidge’s pace slowed a fraction as she clocked the gesture, but the need to transport prisoners to safety was far greater than her curiosity, and so she didn’t pause further as she raced away.

Keith unsheathed his dagger, spinning it with calm assurance around his fingers. With a gentle push of his mind, it glittered and shifted into a long sword. Lance drew up beside him, looping his own weapon in a wide arc of shining silver.

“Think you can keep up with that toothpick?” Keith prodded, jerking his chin at the scimitar.

He could hear Lance’s grin behind his mask.

“Oooh just you wait and see what I can do with my toothpick,” Lance crooned, low and far more deadly than the words were meant to be.

The doors ahead of them squealed metallic pitches of protest as an arm pierced between them. They sighed reedily as they were forced further apart. A head followed the arm, then a leg, and then the doors relinquished their hold with a tinny cough as sentries spilled through them.

Fighting with Lance was an utterly unique experience.

Keith thought about the days they’d spent buffing up against each other, ricocheting off each other’s barbs and taunts. It had been annoying, definitely, but there had been a natural synchronicity. Lance would push, and Keith would pull, until they were both snapping at each other’s heels until someone with bigger teeth than either of them stepped between to break things up.

It wasn't quite on par with the level of synchronicity Keith shared with Shiro. That was a kind of skill that could only be siphoned off of a bedrock of trust and a decade of familiarity.

It was rougher, more raw and distinctly primal. Keith felt a breeze of singeing noise behind his head, and he didn't have to turn to know that Lance had catapulted a shot over his shoulder. Another shot sang by his bicep, and Keith moved as if attached to it by thread, his body obeying reflex rather than reason.

"On your six," he grunted between the sharp thrusts of his blade.

Lance ducked, peeling his scimitar out of its sheath and ramming it brutally upwards through the head of a nearby sentry.

In response to Keith’s tip, Lance chirped, "Ten o'clock."

Keith struck out blindly where he'd been directed. He was rewarded with the satisfying crunch of metal bowing to the superior force of his blow

Another sputter of sentries spilled discordantly through the door, their metal boots scraping shrieks out of the ground and the buckled moaning doors.

"Get down!" Lance barked.

Keith dropped into a roll as a fresh myriad joined the chorus of noise. It ascended into a snarling crescendo as robotic corpses hit the floor in a flurry of disjointed parts. Keith rolled sideways into the thinning herd, swiping away limbs and heads and other parts that looked important. A crush of bolted metal curved into a noose around his windpipe. The retort sprang to life in Keith's muscles before his head, and the sentry looped in a fine arc as he dragged it forwards to flip over his shoulder. It had barely bounced off the ground when Lance shot it clean through the breastplate, and the concerto of the fight faded.

"Nice work," Lance told him on an outbreath, the words rushed and dropping like stones from his mouth.

They gave Keith pause, and he glanced up at the encore note of Lance resheathing his silver blade.

"We should find Pidge. She could need help with the last of the prisoners," Keith suggested as he straightened up.

"Negative, Keith," Regris's voice shivered through the comm, reedy and ragged. "The intel is not being stored here on the bridge. It is being held on a remote server near your location. Proceed to-"

"Guys!" Pidge's voice folded over Regris's in a hoarse shout. Both Keith and Lance immediately stilled. "There's another battalion of sentries heading this way. I've sealed the doors to the corridor but we need backup."

The way Regris barked back over the comms sounded fuzzier than before, the sound crumbling as it failed to accommodate his volume.

"The priority is gathering the intel! Voltron will have to fare on their own."

When neither Lance nor Keith responded, he added in a razor tone, "That is an order. Confirm, soldiers."

Keith swayed where he stood.  His natural instinct was to dive towards the prisoners and offer Pidge his aid, but logic took the silhouette of Kolivan as it spoke into his mind the concept that the intel stored on the cruiser would save countless more lives. His feet could not cooperate with each other, and so they both stubbornly stayed where they were.

"What about Pidge?" Keith asked. His voice was laced with a desperation that felt older than his years. He felt too impossibly small to decide the value of someone's life in the heat of a moment.

"The intel is the priority," Regris repeated. "I'm sending you the location of the server now. We will reconvene at the extraction point in fifteen dobashes. Confirm."

Before Keith could cleave his heart from his mind, Lance answered smartly, "Confirmed. We'll meet you back at the ship."

There was a deadly sounding click as Regris flicked off his comms. Keith binked at Lance from behind his mask. There was a feeling swelling hot and tight in his belly, pumping his veins with war and urging him to unleash violence.

"We have to help those people-" He started towards Lance, fingers snarling into fists.

"We're going to," Lance snapped back.

His fingers had recoiled into his palms as well, and Keith could see them growl with the way they shook. Lance looked like he wanted to unleash violence too.

The thought was strangely clarifying. Lance had appeared so unaffected that for a moment Keith had believed him cold. It was comforting to discover that he was not alone in his turmoil between what was right and what was beneficial. This realisation helped him to finally sever the stranglehold his heart had around his tempestuous thoughts, and so with a clear understanding of the situation, Keith stated, "We can't do both. Not in fifteen dobashes."

"We can and we will," Lance dipped his head low. "If we split up."

As if it were privy to the conversation, Lance’s vambrace chimed with a message from Regris. Lance pulled up the schematics of the ship into a ghostly hologram in front of them. A vent not three corridors from them had been highlighted in vibrant blue, and it pulsed warningly, daring them to break protocol.

Keith stared at Lance through the steady beat of the location marker as he said, “What if you run into a squadron?”

“Who do you think you’re talking to,” Lance replied, his voice lilting with the curve of a grin Keith couldn’t see.

Keith looked down the hall in the direction of the vent. He glanced back the other way, to where the yawning throat of the hallway echoed back a whisper of the chaos outside in shuddering sighs and deep groans. Keith once again looked at the location peg blinking above Lance’s forearm. Each beat of its light was one tick that Keith felt whittling away at his indecision.

“I’ll help Pidge, you get the intel,” he decided at once.

The hologram convulsed into a slash of pixels as Lance grabbed Keith’s bicep before he could step away.

“No,” he said. “You go and get the intel. I’ll protect the prisoners.”

“What? No,” Keith argued automatically.

He knew Pidge, he was used to her stinging wit and her hungry tenacity. It was the natural choice that he go to her aid, since they’d spent a year learning how to fit together like lock and key. But Lance shook his head firmly as his grip on Keith’s upper arm tightened.

“I have more experience fighting the Galra. I’ll be able to protect them better. The server should be a straight shot. Just clear yourself a path, rip out the motherboard, and reconvene at the drop point.”

Keith lifted his chin to rebuff this logic, but Lance stamped down on the protest by saying, “We’re doing this now, Keith.”

And with that, he gave the red paladin a short shove down the corridor in the direction of the server before bounding off in the opposite direction in great loping strides. Keith hissed with great displeasure through his teeth, but he was not proud enough to ignore that pursuing the other boy would benefit exactly no one. So even with his ego prickling, Keith span on his heel and sprinted down the hallway towards where the blinking blue pin had pointed him.

The server wasn’t difficult to find, but it was difficult to get to. It sat no more than 10 yards from Keith, innocuous in its simple square carving. However, Keith stood ten yards back from it, fighting through a thick wave of sentries. They weren’t skilled warriors like the other Galra elite, but they shared their tactics from the battlefield spacecraft; fire enough lasers and you’re sure to hit your mark sooner or later. Keith could pirouette with the agility of a trained acrobatic and it would still only be a matter of time before one of them landed a lucky hit, and things would only slow down from there. Volumes of dumb and diligent foes like such were best dispatched quickly and brutaly.

It took Keith less than two dobashes to reduce the tide of enemies into a crudely coded scrap heap before he was crouching in front of the wide panel on the wall. Carefully, he willed his blade back into a dagger and jammed it into the crevice that divided it from the ship, prying the panel away. Behind was a snakepit of wires, criss-crossing and winding over each other in great glowing snarls of technology.

Lance had said to rip out the motherboard, but one look at the server indicated that the job was going to be much more delicate than that. Keith worried that pulling out even one wire would collapse the entire ecosystem of industry that had been proving inside the walls. He pulled up the schematic that Regris had sent them, thumbing through it for an adequate explanation for extraction. What he found was a clumsy diagram of a few circuit boards, some highlighted with blue spirals and pin pricks of light. He held the diagram up to the server in front of him, aligning the two into a row, concept over execution. Taking several moments to look between them, Keith gingerly reached up to hook the tip of his finger around a wire. He held his breath as he gave it a generous tug. It recoiled from the body of the computer with a small rattle of protest, but the machine kept on blinking healthily, so Keith tugged at another, and another, until he’d released three circuit boards. Reaching his hand in towards them very carefully, Keith pinched all three and drew them out as siblings, each one hugging the other tightly as he wrapped more fingers around them in their ascent. Once they were free, Keith slotted the panel back into the wall. It was a patch job at best, but if there were only drones patrolling these halls, then perhaps the theft could remain undetected for at least a movement.

He tucked the circuit boards safely clinging to each other into one of the pouches on his belt, making sure to buckle it tightly as he began to run the distance back to the drop point. The halls snared his sense of direction as best they could, but Keith stuck firmly to the blueprints that had branded themselves behind his eyelids. Right, left, right again. He paused at a corner as the clustered footfalls of a sentry squadron ran past, only emerging from his hiding place once they’d faded into a dull pattering.

Keith made it to the drop point faster than he thought he would. Regris and Vrek already stood on the lip of ship as Keith fell out of the hole Lance had cut earlier. He launched off the base of the cruiser with a powerful kick, his jetpack compensating for whatever propulsion he lacked. Vrek’s strong grip closed around his forearm as soon as he was within distance, pulling him firmly into the safety of the Marmoran vessel.

Regris was on him immediately. “Where is Lance?”

His voice was cut with an accusation that Keith didn’t appreciate.

“He went to help get the prisoners to safety,” he replied tersely.

“That was not the order you received.”

“I got the intel,” Keith grunted.

He pulled the trio of circuitry from his pocket with a fresh sense of triumph. Regris snatched them from his fingers before they’d even had a chance to gleam prettily in the light.

As he tucked them into the satchel at his hip, he asked, “Where is Lance?”

There was no use in lying. For all the challenges he’d grown to weather, Keith felt himself wilting under the cool blank stare from Regris’s mask. Half of the truth had already been told when Keith escaped the cruiser alone, and there was little point in trying to hide the rest of it.

“He went to help the prisoners,” Keith told Regris solemnly.

The Galra made no move other than to curl his tail a little tighter to his body.

“If he does not return within 3 dobashes,” Regris said plainly. “Then he will be left behind.”

“He’ll be here,” Keith began before changing tactics. “I’ll go and get him.”

Vrek stepped decisively in front of the door, a dark column of resistance.

“You will remain on the ship,” he told Keith with a flat tone of voice.

Keith felt a hot curl of objection bind in his gut.

“He might need help.”

“He should have followed orders,” Regris bit out. “Otherwise he would not be in this situation now.”

Keith’s arm whipped out with such speed for a moment he wasn’t sure what its intention was until he crammed his fingers into the space of his ear, pressed down hard on his comm link.

“Lance!” he growled down the line. “Lance, where are you?”

“-ith. Is th-” Keith started at the sputter of words that rattled through the device. “-ot fret, _amigos!”_

Keith was so relieved to hear Lance’s voice that the foreign word snuck completely past him.

“Hey Keith!” Pidge cried joyfully in the background, her voice sounding far away like she was yelling down an old lead pipe.

“Pidge,” Keith breathed her name out like a prayer of thanks, glad for her safety.

“Keith says hi,” Lance told her. “We got all the prisoners on board the green lion safe and sound. Heading back to the Castle of Lions now. Regris, get the pod there, we can give you shelter.”

Like Keith, Regris was not too proud to recognise a lifeline when once was tossed towards him. This was doubly impressive since the Galra were quintessentially proud, and Regris was a full blooded Galran soldier.

He nodded to himself and spoke into the comms, “Confirmed. We shall speed a course for the Castle’s hangar.”

“We’ll clear you a path,” Lance responded before clicking off.

Before the comm went dead, Keith heard the other boy begin murmuring a relay of their conversation back to Pidge. In the distance, Keith heard the Green Lion roar followed by a boom that felt shockingly wide for the silent vacuum of space. He grinned privately behind the safety of his mask - he hadn’t realised how much he’d missed Pidge’s streak of wickedness until just then.

The Marmoran pilot span their ship in a flourish of jerky speed out of the suffocating shadow of the Galra cruiser and out into the great wide airlessness of space. They tipped the vessel on its side, heading towards the Castle of Lions. Keith could see it clearly in the distance, the pale peaks still pinching the sky. Once again, he was struck with the notion of reaching out and plucking the castle’s impression right out of its starry backdrop. It felt different this time though.

Because Keith felt like he was the one being plucked out of a backdrop of shifting shades of purple and returned to a warmth he wasn’t aware he’d lost.

 

***

 

Returning to the castle ship was a strange experience for Keith. As soon as the slim mouth of the hangar swallowed around the ship, it was as if Keith was blinking through new eyes. Everything about the castle was so bright it felt blinding. Keith glanced back at the ship as they traipsed towards the bridge, thinking that it cut such a violent darkness against the ghostly backdrop of the hangar, it looked like a tear that had been scraped through a blank canvas. The sight of it made him feel foreign and intrusive.

They hadn’t heard from Lance or Pidge since they’d docked, but Keith had seen the Green lion sweep into its hangar before they’d made a beeline for the pod bay so he assumed they would be on the bridge. Regris and Vrek walked shoulder to shoulder in front of Keith as they made a path there. He didn’t need to see their faces to know that they were tense, it was clear from the solid cut of their shoulders, the cement straightness of their backs. If they were upset with Lance, Keith couldn’t tell. Losing people in war must have been so commonplace that they’d learned how to pull a veneer of immunity around their hearts and make them hard.

The doors to the bridge slid open with a hushed hiss as they entered. The room had too many people in it as Keith finally found a space between Regris and Vrek that was big enough to step between. This wasn’t to say that Keith felt crowded, he didn’t, and it was rarely possible for him to since he’d grown up in a foster home with twenty beds to a room and now he slept in a barrack with the same amount. What it actually meant was that there were people there that Keith hadn’t been expecting. Hunk sat slumped in his chair, with legs splaying out in front of him whilst Pidge tapped away voraciously at her screen, Allura curving over her shoulder as she murmured something to the green paladin. Coran was notably absent, though Keith supposed he was herding the prisoners into healing pods and making sure everyone was comfortable. It was the two dim figures ahead of him that caught Keith’s attention.

Kolivan and Antok stood by the dashboard talking with Shiro, their hulking forms dwarfing the Black Paladin - a rare spectacle. Like the ship, they stood out dark as dominoes against the soft violet scheme of the castle. All three of them turned their heads as Keith and the others joined the bridge, Shiro and Kolivan with neutral expressions, Antok remaining hidden under the default neutrality of his mask.

Shiro smiled triumphantly as they stepped closer.

“Good work out there, team.”

“Thanks Shiro,” Hunk said with a groan and a half-hearted wave.

At the sight of his brother, Keith felt something tug behind his sternum. He’d seen Shiro a handful of times since he’d joined the Blade, but it was always through a screen, the pixels washing him of the pink in his cheeks and the warmth in his eyes, watering him down to a collection of binary that just looked like Shiro. Now he stood before him and Keith felt a sudden painful ache to reach out and _touch,_ to prove that his hand wouldn’t pass through the image of his brother.

Shiro saved him the trouble of reaching by grabbing Keith by the shoulders and pulling him into a tight embrace.

With a flood of relief, he breathed, “Keith. It’s great to see you.”

Keith tried his best not to slump into the hug, but the firmness of Shiro’s arms ensnaring him was so reassuring that his body made the decision for him as it leaned into his brother’s solid form.

“You too, Shiro,” Keith sighed, and his body sagged further in sympathy.

“Keith, you’re back!” was all the warning he got before Hunk scooped up both Keith and Shiro in his arms. “We missed you, buddy.”

“I missed you guys, too,” Keith wheezed through a chuckle.

He felt strangely exposed as Hunk’s arms left him and Shiro stepped back. He’d spent the past two months sculpting himself into a factory made standard Blade of Marmora, that being acknowledged as something more, as himself, felt as though he was being illuminated under a spotlight. His natural tendency was to shrink away from it, and he ducked his head under the impassive gazes of Kolivan and Antok.

Turning to Allura, he called, “Hello, Princess.”

Allura looked at him from her raised position on the dais. She seemed so far above him as she tilted her chin down, an impossible expression on her pretty face.

She blinked once, slowly, before replying, “Keith.”

That was it. Just his name.

It was just how the Blades called him, and yet coming from Allura it felt so far removed that he couldn’t hold her stare.

He suddenly felt incredibly and unfortunately out of place. The castle ship seemed sacred somehow, and Keith’s presence was tainted with the backhandedness of espionage. He was no longer a shining soldier providing a beacon of fortitude on the frontlines. He’d shed that skin in favour of a new palette, more murky in every way. There was no way for him to scrape the feeling from his skin; it clung to him sticky and poisonous like tar.

Kolivan broke the tension as he lifted his chin towards Regris.

“Did you get the intel?”

Regris gave his tail a flick as he responded, “We were successful in our extraction.”

Kolivan gave one ear a flick in retort as he said, “One of your team returned in a lion with the green paladin.”

It was a contest, Keith could tell by the way Regris swished his tail again with agitation. They hadn’t stuck together as directed, and Kolivan knew that mistakes cost lives. Keith could barely imagine what it would mean for him to lose Lance’s life. He only had to recognise the gentle way in which Kolivan behaved so patiently with the other boy to guess.

It was only then that Keith noticed Lance. He stood at an angle as usual, propping himself at a slant against the back of Keith’s old chair. His ankles were crossed as well as his arms, one elbow supporting his weight in a way that suggested it didn’t really want to.

He was so much looser than the other Blades that held themselves so stiff and tall. He was so much deeper than the shining white of the castle ship. He was somewhere hovering ambiguously between the two.

Exactly like Keith.

“Yesssss,” Regris rasped.

He didn’t offer anything after that. If he was covering Lance’s disobedience, then it was a mercy. If he was covering his own leadership skills, then it was a selfishness. Keith couldn’t decide which. It felt odd that he’d once been on a team when such a thing wouldn’t have been in question. He glanced around the bridge again at the other paladins and the tug behind his sternum pulled harder.

“The important thing is that we managed to get all the prisoners out of there, thanks to…”

Shiro’s voice trailed off somewhere to the side of his mouth, and his eyes followed with it, trailing off somewhere to the side of Keith’s head. It was not difficult to understand why: Keith only had to tilt his head to hear the soft _‘hah!’_ Lance exhaled as he pulled his hood back from his head.

“Thanks to-” Shiro’s mouth seemed to be making a conscious effort to chase the words he’d lost moments ago, though they weren’t truly succeeding.

Keith unhinged his jaw only for Pidge to speak for him.

“Lance!”

The tall boy froze at the sound of his name, his eyes flitting around the room for the source.

“That is your name, right?” Pidge revealed herself by crawling rather gracelessly over the back of her chair. The entire movement looked like it was being played in reverse, limbs poking out at odd intervals as she fought against the weakened gravity to right herself.

“Uuuuuh yeah?” Lance managed. His eyes narrowed as Pidge bounced over to him, though it was an impressive display of restraint that his fingers didn’t immediately twitch towards his rifle.

The green paladin planted herself at the foot of Lance’s body, looking him up and down with a long hum. Lance didn’t squirm under her gaze. Instead, he flattened his feet to the ground and lifted his chin, meeting her inquisitive stare with a hard glare. It was a response that had Keith’s chest buzzing with resonance, a deep bone root feeling that was both instinctive and satisfactory. But the longer he looked at Lance, the less natural it felt.

For a human, the response seemed inorganic. Lance had been planted in nourishing, fertile soil but watered with the blood spray of war, and as such had grown into a twisted anomaly of himself. It was a trained response, Keith realised, not a natural one, a secondary call that overwrote the primary. It had been hammered so hard over Lance’s human instinct that it would have been hard to recognise were Keith not making such a transition himself.

Pidge thrust out her hand in clear invitation.

“Keith told us about you! It’s so great to officially meet you in person!”

Lance glanced down at Pidge’s extended hand, then up to her face, eyes narrowed as he tried to peer between her words and glimpse the intention behind them. His fingers twitched towards Pidge’s. Keith expected Lance to grab the green paladin’s forearm in standard Galra greeting. Lance seemed to expect this too, as he rocked forward on the balls of his feet to accommodate the stretch. But he got caught halfway, his fingers flexing in mid air as if he’d forgotten how to use them. Keith watched with rapt interest as Lance slipped his hand into Pidge’s, curling it around hers with a gentle grip, like he was testing it out for the first time. He snagged on what Pidge had said, though, his eyebrows lifting not a tick later.

“Keith talked to you about me?”

Lance’s eyes drifted over to Keith’s, wide with surprise and shining with something that looked like happiness from this angle.

“Well, the bits we could get out of him anyway.” Hunk’s voice made room for itself in the conversation as he stepped over. “I gotta know, what’s it like growing up in space?”

Lance blinked. There were questions for small talk and there were questions for talk that was much bigger than the room, and Hunk had unwittingly stumbled into the latter.

“Uh, well it’s- Woah!”

In the time it had taken Lance to trip over an answer, Hunk had wrapped his thick arms around Lance’s waist and hoisted him a good foot off the ground. Lance’s entire spine went rigid, his arms paused static in the air like a lagging video game. He looked unsure of where to put them, and his face was rapidly crumpling into extreme discomfort. Lance’s waist was so lithe that it looked like Hunk would be able to curl his limbs around a second time should he feel once was not sufficient; a feeling that seemed to grow as the yellow paladin glanced down to make this realisation at the same time as Keith.

“Sorry, buddy,” he told Lance, sounding at least ten miles from apologetic. “I’m a hugger. And seriously, I don’t know about you, but clearly they’re not feeding you enough at that Marmoran base. I’ve gotta cook for you before you go!”

The longer Hunk held Lance, the more confused Keith got. Largely because as Lance’s face twisted tighter and tighter into a knot of uneasiness, the looser and looser his body uncoiled. His shoulders slipped down their steep descent away from his ears, and his hands came to roost on Hunk’s shoulder blades, his fingers flattening out over the broad expanse of Hunk’s back. As soon as they’d found a plane to lie against, it was as though all the fight in Lance’s body was leached through those two points of contact. He hung limp in the circle of Hunk’s embrace, his form moulding around the shape of the yellow paladin, and he released a breath that sounded like he’d been holding it for years. Hunk seemed to then consider winding his arms around Lance’s waist that second time. His hold coiled a little tighter for a moment before he gingerly deposited Lance back onto the ground.

Shiro stepped forward, allowing his stature to fill the silence that had taken hold of the conversation.

“Lance, right?” he asked with the same smile Keith recognised from his days recruiting new pilots. It was the same smile that had won Keith over. “I’m Shiro. I pilot the black lion.”

Lance’s face went slack, his eyes zeroing in on Shiro’s face. He didn’t move to step closer, however, reluctant to leave the residual warm of Hunk’s hug.   
“Wow you- _You’re_ Shiro?” Lance shot Keith an accusatory look. “Keith’s talked about you before, and I know we’ve seen you over comms and stuff, I didn’t realise you’d be so… “ Lance waved his hand in a vague sort of gesture before finishing with an underwhelming, “... Tall.”

Shiro laughed, his head tipping back to let the warm rich sound of it spill from his mouth, and Keith suddenly remembered what it felt like to be buoyant.

“It’s the boots. They give me an extra inch.”

Shiro extended his hand to Lance in offering. Lance took one look at the prosthetic, blinked, and then grasped Shiro’s metal hand firmly. His fingers seemed reluctant to let go, peeling carefully away from Shiro’s digit by digit. Lance’s eyes were having a similar problem, sticking fast to Shiro’s face, moving in tandem as the man stepped away to address Kolivan. Keith’s eyes stuck to Lance similarly, though his attachment felt thicker, less like velcro and more like tar. There was something in the shine of Lance’s eyes that made Keith’s gut coil like a snake.

“Some of these prisoners will need help getting back to their homes. We can give as many as we can pods, but most of them will need help finding refuge.”

Kolivan’s mouth twisted into a painful shape, his brows pinching together. From what Keith knew of him, Kolivan was not an unkind man, though he was reserved to the point of paranoia about deploying the Blade’s forces for humanitarian aid. Keith did not believe this to be a lack of generosity for Kolivan had given so much to the war effort, nor was it a lack of compassion, for he fought for a universe that was peaceful and fair to all. It stemmed from an acute awareness of their resources, and the repercussions that came with losing another Blade, be that to the jaws of battle or to the chains of service.

“I feel the Rebellion is more suited to aiding this situation,” he told Shiro, slowly, every syllable holding a measured weight, like he might tip the scales by being too emphatic.

Keith didn’t think he’d ever seen Kolivan being emphatic about anything, but this too may have stemmed from an acute awareness of his authority. There was an unspoken crookedness about being keen to send others into the fight, and Kolivan was straighter than a die.

“Maybe we could help…?”

The suggestion came from Lance, so quietly that Keith automatically looked elsewhere for the speaker, for Lance was emphatic about everything. The tall boy kept his eyes trained on Kolivan as he gingerly took a step closer to Hunk. Beside him, Antok made a low rumbling noise, tainted with displeasure. Lance froze immediately, looking at him with wide eyes. Keith felt a pressing and immediate need to fill the space that Lance had left open-ended.

Levelling his gaze with Kolivan, he finished, “With the intel we have.”

Kolivan’s lips pressed together skeptically so Keith continued, “If it has information about planets that have been inhabited by Galran troops, then we can cross reference that with planets that we’ve liberated. We can find these people new homes.”

New homes sounded so shiny and novel when Keith said it aloud that there was a final discerning tug behind his sternum before the sensation ran away like a thread being pulled out of a jacket. This was largely because Keith had thought the words to himself a few months before, and they’d sounded shiny and novel in his head back then. It was only now that he released them from his mouth that the novelty began to wear thin, and the reality of being back in the castle ship pressed around him that much more insistently.

Kolivan made a distinctly unhappy face. This was to say that the corners of his mouth pulled down so sharply, it was distinguishable from across the room as something greater than his usually displeased expression.

With a stark tone, he said, “The Blade is not a relocation service. Our primary initiative is infiltrating and dismantling the Galra Empire from the inside. This must remain as a priority.”

“Saving lives should be the priority,” Keith argued reflexively.

Antok unrolled a deep rattle from behind his mask. The message was clear and adamantine: Stand down.

Keith felt his throat swell hotly, and he could not catch the reciprotory chuff that jumped out from between his teeth. All the Blades tensed where they stood, the ghostly glow of their masks turning in terrifying unison to look at Keith. The red paladin felt just as surprised by what he’d done as they; he was so used to being defiant in silence that the noise of rebellion had seemingly risen with its own life and thirst for freedom.

Antok growled loudly and took an aggressively long step forward. His momentum was interrupted by Kolivan holding out a hand to catch his chest, stalling what had fast been becoming the force of a freight train.

“You forget your place, cadet,” Kolivan told him. It wasn’t a vicious reprimand, and that only made it worse. Keith knew how to return verbal blows, but firm patience was a liquor he had trouble absorbing. It made him feel rosy with shame, the colour flooding his cheeks as he ducked his head.

“Everybody calm down,” Shiro burst the bubble of tension that engulfed the room, his stern voice plaintive and deep with authority.

Surprisingly, it was Allura who spoke next. “I think it would be best if we analysed the data you managed to retrieve from the Galra vessel. It might show us where they’re planning to strike next.”

Keith peeked up at her from his hiding place beneath his bangs. She still refused to look at him, but Shiro made up for it in spades, his gaze burning like mercury over Keith’s face, brows pinched together in discontent.

“It’ll take a while to go through all those data files,” Pidge piped up from the other side of the room.

She looked miniature in relation to her work station. Everything else of the bridge worked together to collectively enhance this visual: She was so far away from them all clustered at the the lip of the dashboard, all stood tall whilst she sat in her seat, small hands poised dangerously over her rows of glowing buttons. But none of these things succeeded in diminishing her as she told them confidently, “I could probably do it in a week.”

“There is an entire fleet’s worth of data in these logs,” Regris informed her.

Pidge just grinned wickedly, a smile made entirely of teeth. “Six days it is, then.”

“It would be helpful to have you here,” Shiro picked up the gauntlet Pidge had tossed so carelessly. “We could use your insight in planning these missions. Voltron can handle extraction, but the Blade of Marmora has expertise in sabotage. It would help to know we have a few more heads at the table.”

Lance moved away from Keith’s chair then, taking two steps forward to stand fully erect, everything about his image straightening out into a perfect cookie cutter mould of a Blade. The only thing that set him apart was the rich warm brown of his skin and the crisp glinting blue of his eyes. He was staring directly at Kolivan, unblinking.

It was a challenge, Keith realised. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone challenge Kolivan, the Marmoran leader’s authority was simply that absolute. But Lance’s gaze didn’t waver, not even when Antok breathed a warning rumble in his direction. If anything, he lifted his head higher, like the low chuff was an irritation to his ears.

Hunk, oblivious to the faux pas unfurling in front of him, told them, “You can stay in the guest rooms, there’s tons of them. Plus we have loads of great food you guys are gonna love. At least, I think you’ll love. I don’t know what Galra palates are like but Keith always seemed to like what I made and he’s half Galra, right?”

Allura clutched her hands to her chest, her mouth opening to say something. She seemed to change her mind and closed it, and then she changed her mind again and opened it before closing it a final time. This time it stayed closed. Keith could guess that royalty had bestowed her manners that urged her to bid them welcome. But war had bestowed her a mistrust that forced her to rethink that instinct.

Kolivan weighed the options in the folds of his skin, the wrinkles around his eyes darkening as he narrowed them into slits, the brackets around his mouth sinking as he flattened his lips against his teeth.

They dipped and sprang in undulating waves until he finally said, "I am needed back at the Marmoran base, but I can leave my second in command to proceed with mission tactics."

Lance and Antok moved in unison, both stepping forward in a magnetised pull. Antok tipped his head sideways, his mask gazing owlishly at the tall boy. Lance tipped his back, a stubborn mirror as his bottom lip jutted out in a pout.

"I'm staying too," he stated.

Kolivan shook his head so sternly that, remarkably, the rest of his body didn't so much as move.

"You will be better use back on the base."

"I'm not leaving Ant here. I want to help."

Kolivan perked the corner of his mouth enough to lift the side of his lip, revealing one long canine. "You will return with Regris and Vrek."

Lance opened his mouth to protest again, taking another step forward to draw himself up to his full height, chest puffed.

Before he could belt out another argument, Antok levelled his stance with Kolivan and said calmly, "It would help to have Lance here. He may be able to better communicate our... tactics."

Keith glanced back at Lance to see him shifting uncomfortably at the emphasis. It looked as though the word had burrowed under his suit and carved a misfortunate line across his body, pulling him taught in all the wrong places. Keith wasn't sure what Antok was referring to, but he knew that the Galra spoke in blunt and inflammatory ways. He hesitated to contemplate the length of time it would take to constantly to and fro between the culture barriers.

And so he also stepped forward to say, "I'm staying too."

The set of Kolivan's mouth sank the lines of his face even more.

"I'm familiar with both Blade and Voltron tactics. I'll be able to provide the best insight for both sides."

Even as he said the words, he could see the scales of Kolivan's mind tipping in his favour: One ear flicked back and forth in agitation as he watched Keith with a flat yellow stare.

"You're input is always welcome here, Keith," Shiro told him gently.

Keith risked a glance at Allura as the words landed on him, shining and warm. Her jaw flexed with a disagreement that she was biting down upon, and her iridescent eyes glinted angrily at him through the azure hologram, but she remained silent. Keith's head felt all at once too heavy for his body, and he dropped it to avoid her pointed glare.

"Very well," Kolivan conceded, though it looked like it pained him to do so. "Antok, Lance, Keith. You will remain here on the castle of Lions for the following six movements. I will expect nightly reports of your progress with the intel you acquired."

"Confirmed," Antok replied, all business.

Lance deflated with a sigh of relief, allowing him to shrink back to his original size. As Keith watched him, Lance's eyes wandered over to where the red paladin stood, catching his gaze. He didn't move at first, his impeccable image as a Blade wearing a little around the corners as he tapped one foot. But as Keith continued to stare at him, Lance very smoothly cocked one hip and quirked a smile. He managed to hold it right up until the moment Allura stood in front of him, at which point he promptly dropped his stance along with hs jaw.

“I suppose I should introduce myself, since we’ll be working together for the coming days,” she said in her most diplomatic tone. She extended one dainty hand towards him. “I am Princess Allura of Altea.”

Lance didn’t appear to have heard her, he was too busy staring so hard that his irises were fully visible within the whites of his eyes. Allura waited patiently, hand suspended, as Lance failed to recompose himself.

When the silence began to stretch into awkwardness, she prompted, “And you are? Lance, was it?”

Keith felt a sudden flash of petty irritation.

He grit out, “Lance.”

Allura turned to face Keith. In her surprise at his interjection, she seemed to forget hardening her features, and for a moment he saw her exactly how he remembered her; young and patient and kind.

It was a moment that only lasted as long as it took for her to respond, “Excuse me?”

“Yes, his name is Lance,” Keith repeated.

Lance hadn’t taken his eyes off Allura the entire interaction, but he did so now to stare at Keith. Very carefully, he closed his jaw, blue eyes searching Keith’s face warily. Allura turned away from Keith with an air of such flippancy that the silver ropes of her long hair swung like a carousel.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Lance,” she greeted him formally, extending her arm fully so that her waiting hand very nearly grazed his stomach.

Lance looked down at it for a tick before apparently realising himself. He snatched Allura’s hand with vigour, giving it a singular stiff shake, once up and once down.

“Pleasure,” he echoed with a wheeze.

If Allura noticed his sudden hoarseness, she had the grace not to comment on it.

Instead, she continued without a bump, “I’m sure we’ll be able to find you and Antok some accomodation in the spare rooms. Hunk, if you wouldn’t mind helping our guests get situated?”

Hunk made to move forward, his face widening with a growing grin at the suggestion. Lance moved too, as if falling into a magnetic pull. His eyes shone bright with excitement until Kolivan cut through his advance.

“At your discretion, Princess Allura, I would like to debrief my team before we move on to any casualties.”

Lance’s face fell like a stone and his entire body curled in on itself like burning paper. He cast his eyes somewhere very far off in the corner. There would be no capturing his gaze from its charge on the other side of the room.

“Of course,” Allura granted. “The briefing room is available, just down the hall.”

“I know where it is,” Keith spoke up.

It was as much as a reminder to himself as it was to Allura, that he had been here in the Castle of Lions before, that he had had a place. But to say ‘before’ was an abstract term. For him, it meant before he’d left to join the Blade. For Allura, it meant before they’d learned of his Galra heritage. Either way, he was ‘after’ now, and the only way on was forwards, which for him meant staying with the Blade. He did not know what it meant for Allura, or the rest of his team for that matter.

Allura nodded her head once, silently, at his interjection.

Shiro eyed her as he filled her silence with a gentle, “Go ahead, Keith. We can show you to your rooms after.”

“Thank you, Black Paladin,” Kolivan said as he held out one arm.

Impressively, Shiro knew to grasp the Marmoran leader at the elbow. The gesture wasn’t tentative, since Keith had never known Shiro to show anything less than his strongest foot first, yet he was sure he’d never seen his brother offer similar pleasantries to any other Blades before. It was a skewed echo of Lance’s greeting from earlier, and Keith found himself struggling to reconcile the bridge between both of his worlds.

Kolivan marched purposefully out of the room, the rest of the Blades trailing behind him like a murky chain of ink. It was only when they were all gathered in the corridor did he turn expectantly to Keith, pausing for directions. Keith beckoned them all with a light waft of his hand, and then followed him dutifully into the briefing room. The dim teal lights lining the ceiling flared into brilliant luminescence as they entered, illuminating the table and chairs placed decisively in the centre of the room. They each sat themselves down at it without a word.

The silence thickened for a few ticks before Kolivan poked a hole in it with a deliberate, “Regris. Your report.”

“Certainly,” Regris clipped back with a swish of his tail.

Keith listened passively to the abridged recount of their mission, his eyes trying and failing to avoid Lance. It was difficult to ignore the other boy, since he was the only thing in the room that was spinning some constant momentum. If it wasn’t the tapping of a foot, it was the fiddling with a strand of hair, or some other innocuous ritual. Currently, Lance was thundering out a rapturous rhythm on his bicep where his arms sat folded tightly over his chest.

“Lance,” Kolivan’s voice rolled over the agitated habit, making Lance’s fingers still in their recital. “Your orders were to retrieve the intel.”

“Keith retrieved the intel,” Lance replied without missing a beat.

“Alone,” Kolivan snapped. “Whilst you were otherwise disposed somewhere else."

"I was helping our allies," Lance snapped back. "That's what we're supposed to do, remember?"

His impetuousness was a mistake. Kolivan's ears flattened menacingly against his head, and he seemed to rise about three feet in stature as he drew himself up to his full height. His lips peeled back to reveal two angry rows of jagged teeth.

"That was not your call to make," he growled. And it was a true growl; Keith could feel the racketing of Kolivan's chuffing larynx ripple through the room.

The Blade leader looked near feral as he continued, "You were not the commanding officer on this mission, Lance. You orders were to extract intel, but instead you sent an untrained, _unsupervised_ , inexperienced soldier to gather the data."

Keith wanted to open his mouth an argue that he wasn't inexperienced, that he had field training with Voltron, but the shine of Kolivan's teeth had him sealing his jaw shut. It obviously wasn't the time and the place to undercut their senior officer's temper with a trivial boast. To Lance's credit, he wasn't buckling under the booming presence of Kolivan's authority, but he wasn't immune either. The longer the Marmoran leader rumbled out his threat, the more Lance shrank into himself, the stubborn jut of his chin trembling slightly.

"Lance," Antok stepped forward, drawing level with Kolivan.

As Lance looked over at the sound of his name, Antok deactivated his mask into a shimmer of pixels. At the sight of his face, Lance wobbled with some small relief. It was an automatic response, and one Keith sympathised with: Brotherhood was a nuclear ressurance of safety.

"Keith could have been hurt," Antok explained calmly.

His tone was gentle like Shiro's, but it was patient in a way Keith couldn't reconcile with the reception he'd been given from the brusque right hand. It seemed terribly appropriate, considering the differences between Voltron and The Blade.

Once again, Keith felt the need to defend the credibility of his skills in combat, but he was interrupted by Lance emitting a hissing sigh.

He dropped his head, along with the challenge of his stare, and mumbled a truly ashamed, "I'm sorry."

The crushing humility of it all but ejected a protest out of Keith's mouth.

"Lance did the right thing," he cut in. "I was able to get the intel we needed and Lance was able to get the prisoners to safety. This mission was a win."

Kolivan regarded him wearily as he replied, "The outcome of the mission is not the primary point here, Keith."

"That's ridiculous," Keith shot back hotly. "We saved those people, that's the primary point."

Antok rumbled deep in his throat, lips quivering with eagerness to reveal his teeth. Kolivan extended a placating hand in front of him.

"We cannot have soldiers operating in the field if they are unable to follow orders," he told Keith firmly. "Lance disobeyed a direct order from Regris. That's grounds for penalisation."

"It was my idea," Keith spat out before he could think. "I told him I'd get the intel and I left before he could argue with me."

Keith could feel Lance's eyes on him, river blue and just as liquid. Keith knew that by meeting them he'd undermine the validity of his story, and so he kept his gaze firmly on Kolivan's.

The leader observed him for a long moment before finally replying in a voice all too deep to be believing, "Then you have proven you are not ready for field operations, Keith. You will be suspended from mission activities until further notice."

Justice was a fickle reverie. Just as soon as Keith felt he'd remedied what shouldn't have been transgressions in the first place, justice had folded elsewhere. It served as a strong reminder of his place, not only through rank, but of home. He wasn't part of Voltron anymore, and he shouldn't have expected the Blades ideals to be the same. Still, being told that he was being suspended made something hot and sickly twist in his gut.

He didn't say anything, couldn't say anything, so he just averted his gaze at the command. It naturally slipped from Kolivan onto Lance, who was watching Keith with something wide eyed and unspoken. It shifted in the planes of his face and the blue of his eyes, his brows slanting with quiet gratitude. Keith inclined his head minimally, so as not to tip off the others to their interaction.

“You are dismissed,” Kolivan told them with finality.

Keith sulked as Regris and Vrek traipsed out of the briefing room, only moving after Antok had followed their exit.

Lance fell into step beside him as they walked behind Kolivan and the others back to the bridge. Keith briefly felt the backs of their knuckles brush together, but it was a sensation that only spanned one swing of his arm before it was gone again.

"Thanks," Lance whispered. And then, as Keith turned to respond, he stubbornly tacked on, "You didn't have to do that."

Keith blinked at him. Lance's head was ducked into a sharp stoop, his cheeks a little pinker than usual. Keith quirked one corner of his mouth in sympathy.

"My pleasure."

 

***

 

It had been clear from their first day on the Castle that Hunk was a zealous host. Once the Blades were added to that prefix, the yellow paladin's delight in attentiveness seemed that much more enthusiastic, considering the hard graft of them as guests. Keith and Lance skittered down the hall as Hunk ushered them towards their rooms. Or rather, ushered Lance. He attempted to chivvy Antok and got a terrorising chuff that shook Keith's boots for his efforts. After that, the large Blade was given a wide berth, as much as Hunk could afford whilst still being helpful. Keith was handed back his old room without a blink, though Allura's eye did twitch when Shiro announced it.

Keith had said it before but the need to say it again was urgent: Being back on the Castle of Lions was strange.

Which was to say, it was strange in the way that it wasn't strange at all. All of his things were still in his room, a few books he'd swiped from the Altean library as well as a handful of trinkets he'd accumulated from various planets and missions: An arrow head from the troops that had aided them on Olkarion, a strange leaf from Alexar-N7 that seemed to change shape every time Keith blinked and never faded from its vital and rich green shade, a clear cube that somehow chimed when Keith shook it, though it was completely see through and he couldn't possibly locate the source of the noise.

When Keith opened his wardrobe, his old red flight jacket was still there, hung up almost reverently on a hanger. The urge to slip it on gnawed at him, his shoulders tingling with the nerve memory of the fabric weighing on his skin. Keith reached out to brush his fingers against it, once, just to feel the texture, before shutting his wardrobe door again. His mind floated down to the hangars deep below his feet. There was an echo of a response, small and distant. It felt warm and familiar as it breathed against his psyche.

_Red._

Keith reached out to brush his thoughts against her, too, once, just to remember what she felt like, before his shut his mind to temptation.

Lance and Antok had been placed in the adjacent corridor. It wasn't too far away to fetch them if needed, but far enough to avoid feeling too familiar. At least in Antok's case, this was true. In the case of Lance, however, he seemed to be actively avoiding his room. More often than not, when Keith entered a communal area, Lance was already there. At first, he simply seemed curious, rifling through Castle data logs, inspecting old Altean books, running his hands over every surface he could touch, as if the dents and dust would whisper secrets of their home to him through the pads of his fingers.

It started as a gentle caress, but by the second day, Lance had already progressed through caution and into carelessness. Keith saw him twice pull a plate out of one of the stacks in the kitchen, only to drop it when he became distracted by something else. Lance’s curiosity held an innocence that was remotely charming. Unlike Antok and the other Blades who regarded new items with a strong air of caution, he approached them with enthusiasm and wonder. On occasion, he would handle something so comfortably well that it breathed of familiarity and knowledge. Keith had seen him pluck Pidge’s iPod from the arm of her chair and thumb through it without even pausing to study the buttons. This struck Keith with a curiosity of his own: Exactly how well did Lance understand Earth technology? Was it something he was truly familiar with? Or was he simply more intuitive than Keith gave him credit for?

These were questions that had too much breadth for the spaces between mission discussions. Keith could no sooner open his mouth to ask about it than they would be called back to the briefing room to pour over the table for another few vargas. That didn’t, however, stop Lance from stuffing his free time with as much exploration as their restricted liberty would allow. Nor did it stop Pidge from commandeering him at as many intervals as there were rooms in the castle.

"So you're half Galra, right?" Pidge prodded him.

Lance's head popped up from where he'd draped himself over the back of the lounge sofa.

"Uhhhh... I guess?"

"He's not," Keith replied. "He's completely human."

Lance shot him a glare that could have melted glass.

"I'm more Galra than you, mullet man."

Keith's hand flew reflexively to the dark locks of hair curling under his jaw.

"It's not a mullet," he tempered. "And I'm half Galra."

"Genetically speaking," Lance drawled, his head disappearing behind the lip of the sofa again. From behind it, his disembodied voice said, "I've been with the Blade most of my life. You didn't even know what chuffing was."

"Yeah, well I know now," Keith fired back.

"I don't," Pidge interjected. "What's chuffing?"

"It's a Galra thing," Lance chirped, his smirking face reappearing again. "For like, challenging other Galra and stuff."

"Or for courting," Keith added automatically. The words had popped out of his mouth as soon as his brain had latched onto Lance's description, a side effect of being drilled so rigorously by Hollo.

Lance tilted his head, giving Keith a very curious look.

"Yeah," he said slowly. "That too."

Pidge shifted in her seat, pushing her glasses further up the peak of her nose as she said, "That's nice and all, but that doesn't really tell me what chuffing IS."

Lance waved his hand in a circle from his wrist. "It's sort of like-"

Keith felt the shudder growing from his esophagus, rolling and expanding behind his ribs, and with an elastic feeling, he let it tear from his lips in a clipped boom.

"Woah!" Pidge jumped a full foot along the sofa. "What the hell, Keith?"

"Like that," Lance gestured at Keith. Then, his expression souring, "Sort of."

Keith rolled his eyes in full revolution before Pidge asked, "So can you chuff, too, Lance?"

"Hey, what do you guys do for fun around here?"

Lance drummed the flat plane of his fingers against the table top in rapturous percussion. It was a distraction from Pidge’s question if Keith had ever seen one. It patted out a clear chorus that chanted, ‘Hey, look over here!’

Keith replied, "Train."

Pidge replied, "Code."

Hunk replied, with remarkably more gumption, "Cook!"

Lance sat up fully at that, his abdomen curling inwards with the tension of his muscles. Keith's eyes followed the curve of it, all the way down the lengthy stretch of his legs. When Lance braced his elbows against his knees, Keith's eyes followed those as well, until they landed on a small patch on the inside of Lance's wrist. They lingered there longer than he wanted to admit.

"Cook? You guys have something other than pulcher curd here?"

"What's pulcher curd?" Hunk mused. "Is it good?"

"Hell no!" Lance cried. "You mean you don't even have it here? Oh my gosh, you gotta show me what kinda stuff you eat."

Hunk visibly brightened at the suggestion. There was little else that could make him shine more than the task of cooking for other people's pleasure, and Lance had handed him the opportunity on a silver platter.

"Yeah man! It'd be my pleasure, c'mon!" He rolled himself to his feet, beckoning Lance with a wide sweep of his arm. "Kitchen's this way!"

Lance hopped off the sofa with a spring that lengthened all the athletic lines of his body. Keith watched him straighten as he fell into an eager gait behind Hunk. Pidge followed too, her tablet tucked firmly underneath her arm. Keith fell into step beside her, half listening to how Hunk described all of his favourite ingredients to a grinning Lance.

"So," Pidge began conversationally. Keith immediately deflated. "He's completely human?"

"Yeah," Keith confirmed. "He told me himself."

"That's crazy!" Pidge exclaimed. Her glasses magnified the manic gleam in her eye, through which Keith could see her mind spinning a web of experiments, each thread connecting to three more, and those in turn connecting to another five. He felt a twinge of pity for the onslaught that awaited the unsuspecting Lance.

"Did you ask him where he came from?" she continued.

Keith thought back to his encounter with Lance in the hallway of the base, how he'd pushed the topic and Lance had pushed back with a rough twist of Keith's arm and a winding blow to his back.

Keith replied, "No."

"Why not? I'm gonna ask him," Pidge ploughed on. "I can't believe he's here! How did he get here? This is deep space, he can't have gotten all the way out to this side of the galaxy on his own!"

Keith just shrugged. It was an underwhelming gesture for an overwhelming question, and therefore anything he might have said would've felt inadequate in response. Remaining silent felt like a safer option for a thread he had yet to pull on.

As they entered the kitchen, Allura looked up from where she was reaching into a cupboard. At the sight of Keith, her mild surprise shifted behind a curtain, momentarily draping her features with thin disdain. Keith dropped his gaze automatically.

It wasn't that he didn't want to talk to her, for he desired strongly to converse with Allura they way they once had, with mutual respect and camaraderie. Rather, it was that Allura's disapproval felt particularly volatile, and Keith knew volatile emotions intimately. He was learned in how such a temperament may respond if pushed too harshly.

"Hey Allura!" Hunk greeted merrily. "We're gonna make some lunch. Lance here has never tried Phallaxian cream stew before."

"I don't even know what cream stew is!" Lance bleated.

At his eager tone, Allura's expression melted into smooth kindness, like frost giving way to flowers. She abandoned her search of the cupboards in favour of stepping forward and lightly folding a hand over Lance's shoulder.

"I am so glad you're enjoying your stay at the Castle," she told him sweetly. "This place was my home for a long time during the war. It's nice that it can be a home for others, too."

Lance's whole face had turned a rich copper, a rosy tint flooding the brown of his skin and the tips of his ears. His eyes flicked down to where Allura's hand rested against his suit, following the line of her arm all the way up to her face. When the two of them locked eyes, his skin glowed another shade brighter.

"Uh yeah, I... Yup, mm-hmm. Great to be here," he choked out.

Keith snorted softly. Pidge elbowed him in the ribs, but her smile was more canine than gentle.

"You joining us for a snack?" Hunk asked her. "I could make you a lil berry sour snack, or some whizzalig crunchers? Ooh! Or how about your favourite? Glitterbug tarts?"

Allura's smile lit up at the sound of sweets, but as she locked eyes with Keith over Hunk's brauny shoulder it faltered, falling at the corners.

"Oh uh, no thank you, Hunk, that's quite alright. I wasn't very hungry to begin with."

And before Hunk could convince her otherwise with the promise of more sweet pastry, she turned on her heel and strode out of the kitchen in a cloud of gossamer silver hair. Keith watched her back as she left, feel his very soul sag as the dismissal.

"Hey," Pidge clasping gently at Keith's elbow caught his attention, and he turned to face her, scrubbing his face of emotion.

“She'll come around," she reassured him.

Keith felt his heart click through several emotions in rapid succession like a dial on a thermostat.

It settled somewhere on the cooler side, and he kept his tone neutral as he responded, "What Allura does is up to her. It's got nothing to do with me."

"Sorry Keith, but that's horse shit and you know it," Pidge said in her least apologetic tone. "You're a part of this team whether or not Allura accepts that."

"Except I'm not," Keith told her plainly.

The tug behind his stern pulled so sharply then that he had to battle to keep from inhaling a tight breath. When Pidge frowned at him, Keith elaborated, "I'm not a part of this team anymore. I joined the Blade of Marmora, remember?"

Something shifted in Pidge's face, and for one truly raw moment, Keith saw a sliver of despair shimmer from behind those big glasses.

"You'll always be a part of this team, Keith," she said quietly. Then, with a mean poke in the soft part between this ribs she added, "Whether or not YOU accept that."

"Guys! You want any food?"

Keith was grateful for Hunk's interruption, and though it may have been cowardly, he took the chance to slip away from Pidge's lingering stare. The magnification of her glasses went two ways, and Keith felt like the bigger her eyes appeared, the more easily she’d be able to see into his head. He could pull that stare out of his memory when he went to sleep later, but for now, the sight of Lance with cream stew around his mouth held far greater interest.

"This stuff is amazing!” Lance managed between heavy sloshing spoonfuls of the stew. "I don't think I've tasted anything this good in decaphoebes! What did you say this stuff was called again?"

"Phallaxian cream stew," Hunk informed him, beaming at the hearty way Lance was inhaling the bowl of it he'd been given. "I added a pinch of ground georry bark to really bring out the spiciness in it."

"Oh my god," Lance moaned around another spilling mouthful. "I wanna drown in this stuff. I would happily die if it was by drowning in this stew. Hunk, please lower me into a vat of it, tell Antok I love him."

"Yeah, Hunk," Pidge snorted from behind her hand. "Go and tell Antok Lance loves him."

"Uuuuuh, sorry buddy but that's a hard pass. I'd rather not get crushed by a Blade of Marmora that makes Shiro look like a stick insect."

"Guys, he's not that bad," Lance cackled. He pulled off one dark gloves to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. Keith's eyes once again found the inside of Lance's wrist, the skin looking that much warmer now it was contrasting so insistently with the inkiness of his Marmoran uniform.

"He's a big softie once you get to know him."

"One of those descriptions is true," Pidge agreed. "Do you think he could lift me over his head with one hand?"

"If you let him," Lance's grin was dangerous encouragement. "He's a show off."

The thought of Antok having to show off his strength was so ludicrous that Keith nearly had to put the thought down somewhere to process it slower. He couldn't imagine a situation in which anyone could underestimate the enormous Blade's braun.

"Softie isn't exactly the word I'd use to describe him" Keith said, a little sourly.

Lance waved one cavalier hand. "Yeah, well, that's because he doesn't like you."

Keith meant to make a small scoff from the back of his throat,  but the noise that escaped was a rough rattle that surprised all of them.

Lance was the first to respond since he was so obviously inoculated to Galran habits.

"Don't let Antok hear you do that when you're talking about him," he warned. "That guy will step on you without even thinking about it."

"What is his problem with me?" Keith demanded.

He could feel the neutral resolve he'd built at Allura's exit quickly crumbling at the prickling with which Lance laced his words. The injustice of both situations felt like a mirror unto each other, one that reflected Keith's image back at himself just how he was. He'd felt this type of frustration before, whenever he'd been bounced to a new home as a child, for nothing more than the crime of being himself. After all, what had Keith really done to Antok or Lance or Allura to provoke such ire?

Lance regarded Keith strangely in response to his question, his lips pressing together like he was trying to keep an answer behind them from spilling out. Keith wanted to squeeze it out of him, his palms itching at the thought of striking out and the promise of blood.

Pidge interrupted him before he could with, “So Keith told me you’re human.”

She’d effectively beaten Keith to the punch. Lance looked like the question had telegraphed a blow through, his taut features slackening with shock. They coiled up again once they’d recovered, bring Lance’s whole posture with them until he looked like he’d been tied in a knot.

Stiffly, he replied, “Keith’s been talking a lot about me then, huh?”

He ran one hand through his choppy brown locks in an impressive effort to appear cavalier.

“Probably jealous of my incredibly awesome skills as a Blade. It’s cool, I get that a lot.”

“Just your name and that you’re human,” Pidge cut his efforts off at the knees. “And part of the Blade of Marmora, too. That’s pretty strange considering that their whole community is Galra.”

“Or half Galra,” Lance countered weakly.

Oblivious to Lance’s growing discomfort, Hunk steam rolled right through the deflect as if it were paper.

“Yeah but you’re completely human, right? How’d you get it? Was it like, special circumstances or something?”

“A better question is how did you get here?” Pidge continued. “This is light years from Earth, it should be impossible for you to be here."

Lance busied himself with replacing his glove on his hand, slim fingers inflating the inky mesh fabric. He responded vaguely, "Who said I'm from Earth?"

For someone who had up until that moment been unexpectedly chatty, it was quite a feat for Lance to manage to pause an entire conversation. Hunk's busy hands stilled in ushering glittering bread rolls into a basket. Pidge blinked so many times in succession that she looked like a skipping VHS. Keith turned the suggestion over in his mind, trying to find a corner of it to pin his thoughts to and failing spectacularly.

Lance hadn't looked up from inspecting his now fully sheathed hand, his fingertips pressing together experimentally.

Hunk tilted one head very slowly before asking, "You mean you're not... Like, not from Earth?"

Lance glanced up at him, eyebrows lifting.

"Well... That's not what I said."

"So you ARE from Earth?" Pidge chided.

She'd gotten ahold of the thread that Lance had mistakenly left loose, and Keith could see her pulling on it with every question until the boy unravelled. Lance's eyes were gradually widening with panic, the corners of his mouth twitching down.

Overcome with the sudden need to draw the attention away from Lance's mild horror, Keith loudly said, "Hey, Hunk."

The yellow paladin looked away from Lance with a snap of his head.

"Are those fresh?" Keith asked, nodding towards the sparkling bread in the basket he was clutching.

“Oh," Hunk glanced down at the food, as if only just remembering he was holding it. "Oh yeah! I baked these like an hour ago. It's meant to be kinda like Pani Popo because these fruits that Coran picked up on Rymar tasted a bit like coconut."

He face turned wistful as he added, "My mum used to bake them all the time during summer. You wanna try one?"

Keith took the bread roll he was offered dutifully, and then, after taking a bite, he took a second one gluttonously. After being on the Marmoran base for so long, he'd really forgotten how _good_ food could be. It had been reduced to just another part of his day, waking, eating, training, sleeping. The Blade was so wrapped up in each component of their operation working effectively and that attitude had most definitely been extended to the cafeteria as well. Even Orok had confirmed that they were more or less being fed nutrients in lieu of flavour.

A mouthful of Hunk's cooking only reminded Keith of the dichotomy of his lives on each team.

Lance tugged a pinch off the bread he'd been offered, sniffing it once before popping it in his mouth. He blinked at the taste, his face opening its defense until his eyes rolled back and he collapsed onto the table.

"Oh my goooooood," he moaned. "This tastes just like my aunt’s coconut bread cake!”

Pidge and Hunk exchanged a look. Lance's reluctance to speak about his origin seemed to only extend as far as his discretion, and it seemed that good food was fast becoming a trigger for loosening his lips.

Hunk set the basket of bread rolls down in the centre of the table, well within arms reach of all of them.

"So what does the Blade of Marmora do for fun out there?" he asked, folding his arms over the table top and resting his chin on them.

"You mean like games?" Lance asked around a mouthful of bread.

He held two more in his hand, ready for consumption after the half he had left pocketed in his cheek.

"Yeah, like recreation. We've got video games here, and me and Pidge build robots sometimes. We can programme them to do loads of crazy stuff."

Keith felt a jolt of pure youth hit his system.

"You guys managed to set up video games?" he asked.

Hunk grinned, "Yeah man, you wanna play? We've got Killbot Phantasm II and everything. Pidge managed to pick it up at the last swap moon we visited."

"Killbot Phantasm?" Lance echoed. His eyes widened to almost the size of his full cheeks. "Hey! I know that game!"

Pidge eyed him surreptitiously.

"Yeah?" she coaxed, nudging the bread basket a few inches closer to Lance's energetic fingers.

He glanced at the basket of shimmering rolls, fingertips twitching even as he narrowed his eyes at Pidge.

"Yeah..." he mumbled, though he was already slowly filching another snack from the basket. "I never got to play the second one though. My big brother Marco was super possessive about his stuff, and then he took it off to college with him so I missed my chance."

Keith's fingers gripped the tabletop. He needed something to ground him since his head had been left spinning with the colossal influx of information. He'd learnt more about Lance in the last few sentences than he had in months at the Marmoran base. And to think, all it had taken was some well cooked food paired with an invasive line of questioning.

“So… Allura’s a princess, right?” Lance continued, utterly indifferent to the rapt attention of their group.

The sudden divergence of conversation caught Keith by surprise, his mind flicking backward so fast he felt the mental whiplash all the way through to his temples.

"Princess of Altea," Pidge confirmed. "But her home planet was destroyed by the Galra ten thousand years ago."

"Can a person still be a ruler if like, they don't have anyone to rule over anymore?" Hunk mused aloud.

"Her home was destroyed?" Lance cried louder. "That's... That's awful! I don't know what I'd do if-"

He sliced the end of the sentence off before it could grow to its full length, his teeth biting through it with a grimace. It made Keith think about the Blade and about Voltron and about his dry wooden shack back in the desert that had once stood so proud and tall. It made him think about having those things wiped away in the blink of an eye. But most of all, it made him think about Allura, and how she must see him now. As part of a race that had extinguished her entire culture. He thought about how she still stood proud and tall after ten thousand years of war, and he quietly built the belief that yes, a person could still be a ruler without anyone to rule over.

"Allura's one of the strongest people I know," he said aloud, lips moving of their own accord. "She'll be a great ruler again someday, after we defeat Zarkon and restore peace to the universe."

"Jeez, it's hard to imagine this war ending," Pidge leaned back far enough in her chair that her eyes scaled the height of the ceiling. "I mean, we've only been out here a year and it feels like it's been forever. And this has been going on for millenia."

"I know," Hunk chimed in, his shoulders sagging. "But we've got Voltron in our corner, and with Shiro and Allura leading the team, Zarkon's gonna be eating dust in no time.

"Ooooh, does someone have a crush?" Lance leaned over the table, waggling his eyebrows at the yellow paladin.

He didn't specify if he was talking about Shiro or Allura, but the implication of the latter made something simmer between Keith's muscles.

"Why are you so interested in Allura all of a sudden?" he enquired in what he hoped was a neutral tone.

The truth was that Keith missed the careful equilibrium that he and Allura had shared, the history of loss they had in common, the twinned dedication to their cause. Seeing how easily gentle she was with Lance and the way he had reacted with stutters and a faint pink staining his cheeks only made that phantom limb she'd severed from Keith ache more fervently. It was a sensation that made him feel distinctly ugly inside. He felt green through to his veins.

Lance shrugged, pushing away one of the coconut bread rolls he'd been clutching.

"She's like the leader, right? Guess it's important to get familiar with your allies." He paused for a moment before adding, "And she's seriously beautiful."

"Seems like _someone_ does have a crush," Hunk teased.

He winked at Lance who responded by turning a frankly violent shade of red. Keith could feel himself turner greener, the sensation tugging a knot tight into his gut.

"Hey, I'm a simple warrior," Lance abandoned his remaining bread rolls in favour of lacing his fingers together at the nape of his neck. "I know a pretty girl when I see one."

"You see a lot of pretty girls in space?" Pidge countered.

Lance made a vague hand gesture accompanied by an even vaguer noise of, "Eh."

"Lance."

The booming voice had all four of them jumping in their seats, Lance included. Keith looked over to seeing Antok filling the doorway. Even the frame of it seemed to shrink away from him, the peak of his hood only inches away from brushing the frame. From under it, his face seemed sharper, the shadows from the hood carving out all the hollows of his bones.

"Oh hey," Lance sat up in his chair as he looked over at his adopted brother. "Antok, have you tried these bread rolls? Hunk baked them! They taste just like coconut bread cake!"

Antok's mouth slanted at one side, the twin scars running up the side of it drooping.

"I've never heard of coconut," he told them. Then, "You're needed in the briefing room."

"Yeah, I'll be right there," Lance told him with a sigh and a gentle roll of his eyes. To the three of them at the table, he said, "Duty calls, paladudes."

With that, he rolled to his feet, swiping the few rolls he'd been harbouring for safety on the edge of the table into the crook of his arm. Keith watched him go, trying to squash the strange tightness he felt in his chest at their conversation. There was no helping the itch that had been left at the back of his mind by Lance's accidental admissions. Keith silently tucked his questions away to pull out on a rainy day. He made a mental note to save some food for that time, too.

As Lance trudged out of the kitchen, Keith faintly heard him chastising, "I know you've got your no-funny-business mission face on, but would it kill you to smile once in a while? You're usually so chatty! Oh, and I swiped some rolls for you to try by the way. Ya welcome!"

Keith shook his head. He didn’t think chatty was the word he’d use to describe Antok. He didn’t think it was the word anyone would use to describe Antok. Clearly there was a side to him that only Lance got to see, since none of the other Blades descriptions ever aligned with his.

Once the doors hissed safely shut, Pidge and Hunk descended upon Keith like a flock of crows.

"So Lance seems nice," Hunk cooed.

"You just like him because he complimented your cooking," Keith grumbled, but he did so with a grin.

"I still wanna know how he got here," Pidge rattled off. "It's an impossibility. I've gotta find out what happened."

"I don't know. Don't you think it's rude to ask?" Hunk scolded her. "He'd probably tell us if he wanted us to know, you know?"

"No, I _don't_ know," Pidge snipped. When she was met with silence, the green paladin threw her hands up in the air so wildly that they were in danger of being flung from her small body.

With terrible exasperation, she cried, "Where did he come from??"

“Hey, Keith!”

Keith looked over from the table to see Shiro leaning against the doorframe. Unlike Antok, he didn't fill it to brimming with stature, but the flood that swallowed Keith's heart was enough to submerge the empty space. Shiro was looking at him with that kind and patient expression he always wore, like a gentle call from a place Keith liked to remember.

"I was hoping I could borrow you for a few vargas. We're gonna be going over more the intel again tonight, so we've got some time."

"Yeah," Keith's reply was automatic as he stood up from the table, call and response. "You wanna train?"

"If you want," Shiro chuckled. "Maybe you could show me all those new moves you learned at the Blade."

Keith grinned, his muscles flexing at the promise of exertion. "If you think you can keep up."

Shiro barked out a deep full belly laugh. It made Keith feel at once buoyant and lighter than he had all month. As an afterthought, he swiped one of the last rolls from the basket, ignoring Pidge's outraged yelp of, "Hey!"

He tossed it at Shiro, who lifted his cybernetic arm in lightning quick time to snatch it out of its trajectory.

"Try one of these,” Keith encouraged. "They taste like coconut."

"Thanks for the pastries, Hunk!" Shiro called over Keith's shoulder, waving the soft roll triumphantly.

Hunk beamed back. Keith distantly noted that it was more smiles in a day than he'd seen since joining the base, and yet, somehow, it was less teeth.

He fell into step beside Shiro easily, their tandem slipping back into itself as seamlessly as putting on an old jacket.

"Keith," Shiro started, restrained. "How are you?"

"I'm fine," Keith replied. When Shiro gave him a flat look, he elaborated, "I've been training, mostly. Today was the first mission the Blade let me out. I'm pretty sure it's only because I know how you guys operate, so they thought I'd be useful."

"Or maybe they're recognising your value in the field. It'd be a waste not to use one of their best swordsman."

"Best swordsman?" Keith couldn't help but scoff. "In Voltron, maybe. But the Blade have been doing this for years. I'm so far behind, Shiro."

He felt a warm reassuring hand plate itself over his shoulder.

"You'll get there, Keith," Shiro promised. "Since when have you ever not given everything your all?"

Keith didn't respond. He didn't know how he could possibly articulate the searing need he felt to better himself for the benefit of their cause. In Voltron it had been easy to stand out. The position of Red Paladin had been reserved for him and him alone. But the Blade was a dark shifting pool of sharp edges and footless facets. Keith couldn't cling to just one edge for stability, he had to be broad enough to spread across all of them. He had to be useful, otherwise there was no place for him. So instead he grit his teeth. There was safety in silence.

Shiro either didn't notice his internal struggle, or he just knew Keith well enough not to try and squeeze it out of him.

He continued smoothly, "But I didn't ask about your training. I asked about you. I want to know how _you_ are."

He came to a stop, fixing Keith with a type of stare that was inflammatory in its patience. "Just because, and I mean this as a friend, you look exhausted, Keith."

Keith felt exhausted, truthfully. But Orok’s words tingled an echo in his ear. He didn't have the luxury of taking a day off. Furthermore, causing Shiro worry would have already been grounds enough for him to refrain from agreeing without the added incentive of his duty.

"I just had a late night," he crafted the words out of his most level tone. It was mostly candor anyway since Keith _had_ had a late night. And weeks of late nights before that compounding heavily with his early mornings, but he wasn't about to add that.

Instead, he assured his brother, "I'll head to bed a little earlier tonight. Happy?"

Shiro's mouth twitched with disappoint, and he said, "Could be happier but I'll take it." His brows knit downwards as he added, "I think we could all do with some extra rest these days."

Keith was halfway to opening his mouth to ask after that sentence when they reached the training room. He took a moment to look, really look hard, at Shiro as they stepped through the sliding doors.

His brother had always had laughter lines running iron strong into his skin from the corners of his eyes, but now they looked as deep as veins, bursting outwards in angry jagged chips. The shadows beneath his eyes were bordering on bruised and his skin had left some of its vibrancy elsewhere. Keith had half a mind to remind Shiro that he didn't look so brilliant himself, but he stopped that thought before it could take shape on his lips. Shiro already worked so hard to keep the team running as precisely as a greased machine that criticising his appearance seemed trivial and cruel.

So instead Keith simply said, "You should get an early night, too. We've got more intel to go over tomorrow."

The smile Shiro shot him was borderline wan masquerading as jovial.

"Will do, Keith."

  


***

 

Keith hadn't quite realised the bounty of intelligence they'd managed to snag from the Galra cruiser until he sat down at the briefing table the following morning. Allura was already there when he arrived, Shiro and Antok stationed at either side of her. Lance was noticeably absent. The schematics of at least ten different Galran frigates hanging suspended in the air in front of them, painting a spectre of battle, pin pricks of light littering their bodies with a steady pulse of gold.

"The prisoners aboard these vessels have likely been in captivity for a long time," Allura was telling them.

She looked up at Keith's entrance, her open expression shuttering as she caught sight of who it was. Keith bit back the sting of it behind his ribs.

Allura continued without greeting, "They'll be weak and in need of aid."

"I know what that's like," Shiro said wearily. He accompanied the words with a rough rub to the back of his neck, his Galra arm shining dully in the blue light of the hologram. Every eye in the room followed the gleam of metal. "If we can programme the escape pods with coordinates and guide the prisoners there, they should be able to just take flight and leave the piloting to the tech."

Allura nodded her agreement. "We'll be able to accommodate some of them here, but a plateau of this multitude will have to be done over a number of missions."

She turned to Antok with an expression that was too broad to name. She looked both hopeful and hardened.

"If the Blade of Marmora were able to create a distraction, we'd have a much higher chance of saving innocent lives."

Antok's head inclined slowly, the orbs of his mask as flat as paint. He didn't have a chance to respond before the briefing room doors swished open with a sigh to reveal Lance stepping through them. He'd abandoned the activation of his mask, though the indigo hood of his uniform had been pulled high over his head, casting a shadow over his face. Beneath it, his blue eyes looked like that of a creature peering out from under a rock, wary and alert.

"What'd I miss?" he asked. "You guys need a distraction? I can be pretty distracting."

At this, his eyes swept over Allura as a grin quirked one corner of his mouth. Keith couldn't see in profile, but judging by the frown that pinched the princess's eyebrows, Keith was willing to bet that Lance had winked at her.

The boy's lazy saunter was derailed by Antok's wide clawed hand coming down on his shoulder hard enough for Lance's knees to wobble.

"Voltron has managed to extract prisoners in the past without external help," Antok reminded them. "We will deploy the troops we can, but there are other missions that require priority."

This made a familiar heat coil in Keith's gut.

Before he could stop himself, he blurted, "What's more important than saving lives?"

Surprisingly, it was none of the three leaders that answered him. It was Lance, standing as lean as a slip next to three strong pillars of authority and somehow leaning out of their shadows.

"We are saving lives," he said, sounding miffed. "By taking out the bigger threat, we can prevent people from being captured in the first place. We're trying to treat the cause, not the symptom."

The amount of sense that made to Keith was startling. It was as Antok had said; Voltron had carried off innumerable rescue missions in the past. And all the while, the Blade had been working behind the scenes to dismantle the Galran tyranny from the inside out.

Keith wondered how many times Voltron had swiped an easy victory because of the background efficiency of The Blade. He wondered how many times Lance had been in the same galaxy as him, fighting the Galra at the same time as him, running a mission parallel to Voltron so that they might all emerge victorious.

He wondered about the inside of Lance's wrist.

"We understand," Shiro addressed Lance before turning to Antok. "But anyone you can spare would be a huge help. I don't think the prisoners will be up for much of a fight if they run into sentries on their way to the escape pods."

"Perhaps Lance could help?" Allura suggested. "Considering he's already here."

"Lance is a valued sniper," Antoke responded in a tone that suggested a little harder that it wasn't an option.

Keith held a suggestion of his own behind his teeth; that he was here too, and was willing and able to help. That he knew Voltron and how they operated.

It took those two thoughts forming side by side for Keith to evolve a barbed reminder for himself: That  he'd left for the Blade because he believed ardently that he would be of better use elsewhere. He couldn't serve either side properly if he kept one foot back in the other. So he let the suggestion stew behind his lips until it tasted sour.

In the time it had taken to come to this conclusion, Pidge had entered the bridge with a tablet in one hand and Hunk's elbow in the other.

"Hold up, guys. I found something you're gonna wanna look at."

She flicked two fingers up from her screen towards the hologram. The spectral fleet of Galra cruisers shifted in a blur of pixels as Pidge's intel burst into its place.

A web of bright teal lines outlined a spiracular mass, a thick disc bearing the centre of it like a wheel. It looked fortified even in the hollow image.

"This is one of the Galra's most high tech detention facilities," Pidge informed them. "It's called Beta Traz."

"Cool," Lance noted. "Looks kinda like a donut."

Pidge glanced at him. Keith could see every neuron in her brain spinning at the urge to ask him if the Blade had donuts, but she blinked hard and the look was gone, her amber eyes focusing on the information dancing in front of her.

"Yeah, well it doesn't have a lot of jelly in the centre. Get this," Pidge leaned in closer to the dashboard. "It only houses one prisoner."

The beat of silence she left gave her time to smile with teeth.

"He's called Slav."

A chorus of voices responded, "Who?"

Antok, ever an outlier, instead asked, "The engineer?"

"You know him?" Pidge queried.

She brandished her tablet in a way that looked vaguely accusatory. Antok folded his massive arms over his chest, his mask tilting downwards.

"I know _of_ him," he clarified. "He's a genius engineer that was helping The Rebel resistance. His technology was so advanced that the Galra took it upon themselves to eliminate the threat he posed promptly."

Lance continued without pause, "He was captured at least a decaphoeb ago. That mission... The Rebels were completely overwhelmed. The Blade saw it happen."

Lance's mouth shut with a snap before he could elaborate. He didn't have to, though. Keith knew the Blade's protocol intimately enough to fill in the blanks.

The Blade saw it happen... And did nothing.

"Liberating him would be a huge asset to the fight against the Galran Empire," Antok cooly picked up where Lance had left the sentence hanging like a ragged end.

"Which brings me to our next point," Hunk saw fit to interject.

He snagged the tablet out of Pidge's waving hand and made a similar motion to what she had, flicking the 'V' of his fingers towards the dashboard. The ghostly paleness of Beta Traz flickered out as a far larger image assumed its place in the centre. It was easily ten times the size of the fleet that surrounded it.

Keith had seen Galra ships before, but the vessel that echoed in front of him was bigger than anything he'd ever seen before. He could scarcely comprehend the enormity of it, every edge razor sleek and imposing.

"These are the baseline schematics for Zarkon's ship," Hunk told them, a little breathlessly.

Keith took the moment to observe at the Yellow Paladin. Hunk looked as if he was only now beginning to understand the enormity of the vessel. His eyes just kept getting wider and rounder as they scaled the outline of it. Lance whistled long and low.

"That thing could have its own orbit. How can one guy need something that huge?"

"That ship is gonna be a fortress," Shiro observed. There was a creeping weariness in his tone that Keith only recognised from years of exposure. Shiro had mastered sincerity but his mask had a tendency to slip a fraction when he was tired. Keith tried to keep his eyes on the ship and not on the shadowy circles staining beneath his brother's eyes.

"Right?" Pidge concurred. Her enthusiasm effectively balanced out the strain in Shiro's voice, so it went unnoticed by everyone else. "So that got me thinking. If we can't get to Zarkon's ship, wwwwhhhhy not bring Zarkon's ship to us?"

The stunned silence that followed was its own question.

Pidge forged onwards through it. "I was thinking about what Coran said about wormhole technology. I think if we can harvest enough scaultrite to create a teludav, we could essentially warp Zarkon's HQ to somewhere else."

"Which would mean stripping it of it's defenses," Shiro cottoned on quickly. His eyebrows stressed together in the way they did when he was either considering something very smart or very stupid.

Allura poked the idea towards the latter. "To power a teludav that big would take a Balmeran crystal of enormous size."

"Yeah, so I was thinking about that," Hunk piped up. "And how it's pretty lucky that we just happen to know a Balmera with some pretty friendly Balmeran residents."

Pidge nudged him between the ribs with her pointy elbow. Since she was so small and Hunk was so big, Keith would have wagered she could jam that limb deeper than expected, judging by the dramatic way in which Hunk folded over clutching his belly.

"You just wanna see your girlfriend again," Pidge teased him.

Hunk looked overly affronted, his chest puffing out like it was trying to make up for being doubled in by a fourteen year old.

"You have a girlfriend?" Lance asked.

Keith glanced at him. His entire person had perked up with curiosity, eyebrows arching almost to his hairline and his eyes glinting a fierce blue with the complimentary light of the hologram. He wasn't even trying to conceal his interest in the topic, which was a new look on him, one that had Keith eyeing him suspiciously.

Hunk puffed out even more.

"Shay is NOT my girlfriend. She's just a very pretty Balmeran... Alien... Lady... Person, that I think is super nice. And we get along really well and stuff, thank you very much."

Lance cocked his head strangely, his eyes round and confused. He looked like an owl, Keith thought.

"But if you get along and stuff, and you like her, then why aren't you together?"

This had an immediate effect on Hunk. There was exposure in simplicity, after all, and the Blades were nothing if not candid. Keith had shared the same thought path as Lance but at least had enough tact not to vocalise it. But then again, in this case Keith had the social advantage of being raised on Earth, so he had enough decency to sympathise with the way Hunk curled in on himself like torched paper, his fingers pinching together anxiously.

"I just don't think she likes me like that."

Lance's head tilted further, in danger of falling from his neck.

"Why don't you ask her?"

Hunk twitched violently, like he was suppressing a shudder. "I don't know. What if she says she doesn't?"

"Handsome guy like you?" Lance's grin was spectacular. "How could she not? You'll never know unless you ask, buddy."

A loud rumbling cough shook through their conversation. Antok shifted his thick arms, folding them a little more sternly over his chest.

"Perhaps we could get back to addressing the mission at hand, and leave matters of courting until later," he advised them.

Hunk shuffled his broad form into the smallest size he could make, the tips of his ears flushing dark under the unrelenting stare of Antok's mask.

"Sure. Yes. We should do that," he mumbled.

Keith glanced back in time to see Lance scowling at Antok. The large Galra seemed unphased.

Shiro took the lead in remastering the helm. He asked, "So how does Slav factor into this?"

"He's an expert in teludav technology," Pidge vouched. "According to this file, he was attempting to build the Rebels a series of wormhole checkpoints to help them get supplies further across the galaxy, and to escape missions. That's when the Galra decided to capture him to prevent any future attacks on their bases."

“It’s a sound strategy,” Keith hummed. “Take away the engineer, the whole engine doesn’t run.”

Lance muttered a rough sounding Galran word. Antok cuffed him around the ear with the tip of his tail. The rest of his body stayed as still as rock. The only evidence he’d moved at all was the disgruntled expression Lance was pulling as he pawed exaggeratedly at his head.

“Right,” Shiro leaned forward on the dashboard.

This was something he did to the benefit of the team. Shiro was often the tallest in the room, and bracing his weight on his arms allowed him to gaze more levelly into his team members’ eyes as he doled out everyone’s share of orders. His plan was disrupted, however, by the presence of Antok, who easily had a foot and a half on Shiro. Not that it would have been easy to establish eye contact anyway; he kept his mask almost defiantly in place.

“Voltron will handle the extraction of scaultrite. Lance, Antok-” Shiro craned his neck uncomfortably to look up at Antok before thinking better of it and straightening to face the soldier. “Can you, Lance, and Keith help with the rescue of the prisoner from Beta Traz?”

Antok stayed silent for a tick. Beside him, Lance fidgeted, his eyes sliding up to glance at his adoptive brother’s impassive mask. Antok shifted slightly, he head inclining towards Lance a sharp fraction, like a twitch. Keith bit down on a snort; he was pretty sure Lance had kicked Antok in the shin.

“It would be our honour,” he told Shiro. His tone sounded like a strange shade of resignation Keith had never heard before.

Beside him, Lance’s grin was positively Cheshire. Shiro’s shoulders sagged, his posture dripping with badly veiled relief. It made the shadows under his eyes look darker, but he smiled gently all the same.

“Thank you,” he said earnestly.

Shiro extended an arm, waiting for Antok to mirror him before the two of them grasped each other’s forearms in the typical Galran gesture of gratitude.

“Great. Then it’s settled,” Shiro continued when he’d released his grip. “Our priority is rescuing the engineer, Slav. We’ll move out at the end of the week.”

He turned to Hunk and Pidge to ask, “Do you two think you can handle extracting the raw scaultrite?”

Pidge pressed her lips together, breathing out a huff of air. “Can we handle it? We’ll make it look like child’s play.”

“Yeah, c’mon Shiro,” Hunk waved a carefree hand in the air. “What’s so hard about hunting down an ancient galactic creature the size of a small planet, navigating its enormous internal gastric system, and harvesting its guts?”

With every word, Hunk seemed to realise the answer of his own question. He somehow succeeded in folding himself into an even smaller size than before. Shiro let out a breathy chuckle. The sound of it was magical reassurance, and Hunk uncurled from the knot he'd tied himself into.

"Well, I'm glad you're confident. I'll leave the rest to you," Shiro said with an encouraging smile.

Keith would challenge anyone not to feel bolder with someone like Shiro providing their sincere belief. It was what had made leaving Earth so easy, and what had made leaving the castle sting less. Shiro wasn't perfect, but he was a good man down to the root, and good men more or less generally tried to do the right thing. Keith wanted to believe himself a good man, and that belief had him folding his arms over his chest to feel the Marmoran uniform press a little tighter against his skin.

"I'll inform Kolivan of our plans," Antok said then. "He'll be able to begin coordinating the available Blade squadrons for an attack on Zarkon's base."

"Good plan," Shiro replied with a curt nod. "In the meantime, let's catalogue the data we have on wormhole technology and see if there's any materials us and the Rebels can collect to help make the teludav. And stay on top of your training. We'll need to be in peak condition to fight Zarkon's forces."

Stood next to Antok and Allura, Keith didn't think any of the three of them could peak beyond their current condition. But that left the rest of them as gaps that needed to be filled, and as it happened, Keith's mentor partner had been shuttled to the castle with him. He looked over at Lance at the same time Shiro did.

However, Shiro had the intention of speaking, whereas Keith did not, and so he got a front row seat to Lance's reaction when Shiro asked him, "Lance, I hear you're something of a sharpshooter? Perhaps you can help take the paladins through some of their paces?"

Lance blinked a couple of times in rapid succession, like he was trying to filter each words through to his brain one at a time. He rolled his lips together as his shoulders dropped, and he uncharacteristically laced his fingers together behind his back. The action pulled his shoulders back, his chest expanding a little with the new height from standing up straighter.

"Yes, sir," he choked the words.

Antok swished his tail in a way that looked like he was contemplating flicking Lance in the ear again. Keith looked at Lance's ears, too, and felt a strange ripple of discomfort to see that they'd sported a rather unexpected flush at the tip.

"Great," Shiro beamed and Lance's ears flushed darker. He turned to Keith, ignorant to the peculiarity of Lance's response. "Why don't you show Lance down to the training room with Pidge and Hunk? Lance can give us paladins a Marmoran crash course."

Keith wanted to remind Shiro that he wasn't a paladin anymore, but the words felt sticky in his throat, and he thought the effort to cough them out would be appreciated by himself alone.

He agreed instead with a simple, "Sure."

To Lance, he motioned towards the doors with a jerk of his head. "C'mon, training room is this way."

Lance followed with a jerk of his body - his head stayed behind for a tick, eyes still locked on Shiro before it had to move or be left behind.

Pidge and Hunk chatted at lightspeed about the teludav and the plan to wormhole Zarkon's ship away from his fleet. Keith was impressed with the idea, and would have said so if he thought he had any hope of interjecting at an opportune moment. He had been around the two of them long enough to know that as soon as a conversation with this level of intricacy started it wasn't a question of when or even if they would stop. It was simply a matter of waiting for something of greater magnitude to interrupt them.

Lance seemed content to hang back behind them, in step with Keith. He was chewing his lip and trembling with the urge to slip between the folds of the conversation. It was only when his knuckles brushed against Keith's did he finally release his lip from between his insatiable teeth.

"Hey, does Shiro have a girlfriend?"

Keith snorted once, loudly. It was partially out of surprise at the turn of topic, but it was mostly out of disbelief at the impossibility. Either way, it was more than enough cause for Lance to shoot him a half hearted glare.

"No way. Shiro's gay," Keith explained.

Lance frowned, pushing his hood back as he responded, "I thought he was human?"

It took Keith a moment to remember that the Galra didn't have a concept of sexuality that warranted labelling. He abruptly felt bad for snorting so derisively. It wasn't Lance's fault he was ignorant. It was simply that he looked like a human and he sounded like a human so much that it was easy to forget he had been raised by an alien race in an alien culture.

"Uh yeah, he is. Gay means you're a male who's attracted to other males exclusively."

"Exclusively..." Lance rolled the word over his tongue like he was tasting it for the first time. "I think I know a few Blades like that."

"Well you definitely know one," Keith mumbled, brushing the back of his neck.

Lance looked at him, head lopsided. It was like he was trying to see Keith at a new angle, the new knowledge applying a fresh filter for him to gaze through.

"You're... Gay?"

Keith nodded slowly. It wasn’t the first time he’d been asked to say it out loud, but it was the first time he had something of a conclusive answer "Yeah, I think so. I’m like ninety nine percent sure."

Lance nodded, too, until his head straightened on his shoulders, and he tapped his chin in thought. Since Lance had started the conversation and Keith had naturally built a road bump to stall its trajectory, Keith felt obliged to push it the rest of the way so it may continue smoothly.

"Are you?" he asked.

"Am I what?" Lance responded.

"Gay."

Lance tapped his chin again, his eyes fixed on Keith's. Keith had asked since it was an obligatory question, not because he really wanted to know the answer. And the longer Lance stared at him, the less he felt he wanted a response, to the point where silence would have been quite adequate.

After a moment, Lance simply said, "I don't know."

"You don't know?"

Keith felt compelled to revise his earlier sentiment: Silence would have been a more adequate response that a spoken one that was unsatisfactory.

Lance seemed less perturbed at the lacking of his answer, as he said, "Yeah man. I mean, how do you know you like someone?"

"It's like..." Keith grasped desperately at the thin threads of attraction that were woven into his past, so meek and fleeting. He summoned the devices that had touched so delicately in his thoughts that he had no choice but to pay attention to them, lest he turn them over in his mind and risk them shattering. It was a fragmented stream of hazy details; a roguish smile here, a gentle word there, the inside of someone's wrist.

"It's like, when you're around them, you want to be better. Do better. You want their attention, and to do right by them. They make you feel inspired."

Lance hummed to himself. His ears steadily began to flush.

Keith nudged him, their shoulders bumping together softly. Lance seemed startled at the physical contact, even more so at Keith's raised eyebrow.

"Someone in mind?" Keith asked.

It was out of his mouth before he realised he didn't particularly want a response to that question either.

Lance took a great deal of care not to twitch. But since he twitched so often and voluminously, the discrepancy of stillness was more off-putting than calming.

"Maybe," he replied after a long moment. “I think I feel like that around Allura?”

If he was going to elaborate, that impulse was cut short by his eyes sliding over to Keith's. He closed his jaw with a snap as though he'd only just realised it was Keith he was talking to and not someone closer. Keith felt once again that he needed to amend his earlier sentiment. As it was, Lance's silence only left the opportunity for Keith's tactical mind to fill in the blanks. What he managed to conjure was an image of long silver hair and iridescent eyes. The thought slid sideways, pretending to fit somewhere it wasn't welcome. Keith shook his head as if he could remove it by jostling it enough. Lance glanced at the action but didn't say anything.

Keith felt their knuckles brush against each other once more.

 

***

 

Surprisingly, Lance was a decent instructor when it came to Blade technique 101. That wasn't to say that he was good in general. Rather, he was quite appalling, and Keith gave up trying to follow his directions less than ten dobashes into his drills, choosing instead to go through his own mandatory training that the Blade had driven into his cerebral like a railroad spike into soft dirt. It was just that Lance's unique style of instruction perfectly fit with Hunk and Pidge unique style of learning: Through mutual idiocy.

"Not like THAT," Lance huffed as Hunk tripped over his own heel for the third time. The barrel roll the yellow paladin executed was both spectacular and completely accidental. "Like THIS."

The flip that Lance performed was tighter, and more importantly, controlled.

Straightening, he explained, "It's more like HWAH, and you suck in your gut like-" Lance demonstrated a large intake of air, his abdomen dipping with the coil of his core.

Hunk nodded seriously, as if the explanation was the most plaintative thing in the world. Keith's lip curled in a very confused version of a sneer.

Across the room, Pidge copied Lance's fast acrobatics in a very contained and lenient fashion. She had less mass which allowed her to move quickly, in this case giving her the advantage of flipping her weight over herself with little challenge. Her restraint came from the unfamiliarity of the move. Keith knew because he'd executed the same flip countless times until it had sunk in between the fibres of his muscle and made itself a memory.

"If this is what they're teaching you at the Blade, can I join?" she asked a little breathlessly. In a smooth motion, she tossed her legs up and over her head once again, catching her weight on her small hands and pivoting into a safe landing.

"That depends," Lance grinned. "Think you can keep up with me?"

"I think I'm picking it up," she grinned back. "Plus we've accomplished like sixty missions since being out here."

Lance’s grin simmered into a smirk, blue eyes flashing. "That's nothing. Try and beat my two hundred plus streak."

Pidge stepped closer, her glasses sliding far enough down her nose that she could leer at Lance over the slice of the wire frame.

She retorted, "Five hundred prisoners rescued so far."

"Thousands."

"Only two casualties."

Lance stopped very abruptly. He straightened his spine along with his mouth, the smirk he'd been sporting so casually slipping off his jaw as quickly as grease.

"Only two? Seriously?" he asked, voice hushed.

Pidge straightened too, her grin dropping with the shift in conversation. She replied, "Uh, yeah."

Lance's next question painted a far broader picture of the Blade than Keith had yet seen.

"How?"

Hunk and Pidge exchanged a look. If they were disturbed by the query, they had perfected the art of masking such emotions.

"Being careful, I guess?" Pidge replied, eventually. "There's been some hairy situations, don't get me wrong. But we always come through."

Lance frowned hard. "What about if someone gets captured? Are you counting those?"

Pidge frowned a little harder, as if the question didn't make sense. "Well, if someone gets captured then we go back and rescue them. Obviously."

"Obviously...?" Lance echoed. It seemed as though the notion had never occurred to him.

"Yeah, dude," Hunk sent him a soft smile. "No man left behind."

Lance tilted his head as if he could see Hunk's point of view. He didn't say anything else, except to mimic Hunk's words.

"No man left behind."

The echo from Lance's lips felt like a taboo, like something rich and dark that he shouldn't be saying out loud. It made Keith's heart feel heavier. Lance had neglected to share how many casualties that Blade had suffered, but silence was opportune, as Keith had found. He didn't need a verbal confirmation to know that the tax of war was paid in life.

Hunk clapped a hand on Lance's shoulder so suddenly it made them all jump. Lance curled in tight to his own body, arms jerking with the reflex to defend himself. He blinked at Hunk's fingers curling in rich brown rows over his pauldron, and then he blinked at Hunk's face beaming a bright white smile. His hold over his body loosened a little, the strain trickling out of his wiry posture.

"Hey man, you gotta be hungry after all those flips. You wanna get a snack?"

Lance's body was uncoiling inch by agonising inch at the size of Hunk's grin, until all the tension slid out from under him and he leaned heavily into the yellow paladin's touch. Physical contact wasn't in short supply at the Marmoran base, but the preset was combat and blows. Anything else was uncommon to the point where it bordered on being faux pas. Affection was private to the point of scandal. Lance let out a thin breath as Hunk's hand curled more firmly over his shoulder. He looked like he was starving.

"Only if you've got more of the delicious bread stuff we had earlier," he chimed hopefully, eyes shining.

"Not quite. But I do have some amazing chips I made out of this weird vegetable from the swap moon. It's so funny, it's like 95 percent starch, I don't even know how it keeps its shape!"

Lance's smile shifted several degrees sideways. Keith had only ever seen him smile in various shades of cunning and blackened mirth. This smile was lighter in every way. For a second, he looked like he'd peeled away the layers of war that had stuck to him over the years, leaving only the cheekiness a teenager like him should have.

"Sure," he agreed, before adding, "Wanna see how many you can fit in my mouth?"

"Ohoho," Hunk chortled. "You have issued a challenge that you cannot win, my friend."

Lance's only response was to bump his shoulder a little further into Hunk's hand until he couldn't go any further, and Hunk had to relinquish his grip to wrap an arm around the boy's shoulders. Lance looked delighted.

They marched in an awkward tandem out the training room, Hunk half carrying Lance who seemed content to lean the majority of his weight against the yellow paladin.

Pidge sidled up to Keith to watch them leave. "Aren't they adorable?"

Keith made a noncommittal noise. He was mostly preoccupied with how Lance was trying to adhere himself to Hunk's side.

"I like Lance," Pidge stated. “He’s goofy.”

Keith looked at her, one eyebrow raised.

She elaborated, "I dunno. I just think he kinda reminds me of my older brother, Matt."

"Matt," Keith balked. "Are you joking?"

Pidge tilted her head. Her eyes hadn't left the training room door, even though Hunk and Lance were long gone.

"No, seriously. Matt's a total dork and always trying to play cool. I kinda feel like Lance is the same."

Keith paused. He followed her line of sight to the flat metal of the closed doors.

He'd been at the Garrison at the same time as Matt Holt. They weren't close, but Matt had known Shiro, and Shiro had known Keith, so their proximity was a result of inevitability rather than gravity. Still, from what Keith had experienced of Matt, him and Pidge were most definitely their parent's children. They each divided their parents charms and follies evenly between themselves.

Matt had inherited Sam Holt's goofy sense of humour and his even temperament, along with Coleen's curiosity for research and tough adaptability. Pidge had inherited what was left - A brain for calculation and a sense of wit as dry as the Sahara.

Trying to fit Lance to that mould wasn't an easy squeeze, but it was close enough that Keith could hold the pieces up and examine the similarity. Lance DID have a goofy sense of humour like Matt. It had just been lost between all the shades of indigo he'd been drowning in for more years than Keith could guess. Being aboard the castle ship had surrounded him with a whole spectrum of colour, and Lance was levitating towards it like a moth to open flame. Keith just hadn't seen him in this light before. But now he had, he could see all the hues of humanity reflecting off him in gleaming technicolour like a prism.

 

***

 

It was 3am.

At least that's what the digital dial on Keith's wall was telling him. He thought, anyway. It was in Altean numbers, hovering in illuminated teal spirals. Keith had been squashing the jagged points of the Galran alphabet through his eyes for so many weeks, it was getting hard to tell other languages apart. Pidge had taken malicious delight in trying to teach them all Altean cursive a few months back by switching the safety off. Keith still remembers how the number for seven had bit him in the back of the head, and the memory of it now made his scalp tingle warningly.

He sat up in his bed, swinging his legs over the edge of the mattress. He'd left his Marmoran uniform on out of pragmatism, but if he was honest about it he'd admit it was laziness. Wearing it in his old bed had made sleep difficult. He wasn't sure if it was because of the way the durable material scratched argumentatively against the softness of the bedsheets, or because the mattress was plush enough that Keith's entire body descended into it until it engulfed his form in a shallow embrace. He briefly considered removing the suit and putting his old clothes on, but the thought of it shifted uncomfortably in his mind, so Keith ceased in trying to pushing it.

Being at the Blade headquarters had bred his sleep into a sheer blanket, ready to be torn open in the blink of an eye. The thick wadding of the Castle duvet was so much fatter than what he'd gotten used to that it was suffocating, the sheer weight of it too oppressive over his shoulders that Keith could barely doze for worry of suffocation. He blinked himself alert in the dim azure glow of his paladin quarters. From the open door of the wardrobe, his flight jacket stared at him, muted red through a mist of blue. Keith pushed off his bed and crossed the room to close the wardrobe shut.

The sight of his jacket sparked the ache of nostalgia, and Keith would not indulge it at a time in the morning when emotions often felt raw and unfiltered. From the hallway came the muted patter of footsteps. To Keith, they sounded like the soft fall of rain against his window back in that shack on Earth. He got up to follow them, not because he was worried they might be a threat, but because they rang a familiar tune in his head, and he was curious of their origin. He had a hunch - he'd heard this melody before back in the Marmoran barracks - but there was little point to having a hunch if you didn't feed it with confirmation. So Keith waited until the footsteps had faded enough for him to strain to hear them before he approached the bedroom door. It slid open obediently with a whisper that felt too loud in the silence of the night. He followed the steps at a distance, hunched forward as his ears reached for the sound. They were heading in the direction of the bridge, Keith noted absently. There was some dull satisfaction in the confirmation of the main door swishing open with a shuddering sigh. The footsteps diminished as their owner proceeded through the doors. Keith held his breath as he counted in his head, 1... 2... 3...

At the first wheeze of the doors beginning to close, Keith shuffled forwards, squeezing through them before they shut tight. He flattened himself against the wall of the bridge, uttering a giddy prayer that he'd left his suit on. He was thankful for the camouflage that wrapped itself so tightly with the shadows of the room.

When he felt sure he hadn't been detected, Keith allowed himself to relax a little before looking up. The feeling of satisfaction throbbed a little stronger in his breast: Lance was curved over the edge of Pidge's seat as he tapped away at the console. His features were lined in starlight from the gaping windows at the front of the ship. His fingers moved in quick, precise jabs. There was nothing idle about his typing; Lance was looking for something.

It didn't take him long to find it. A few rapid punches of the return key finally bullied the main screen into life, and it ignited in a shower of shimmering teal pixels. Lance straightened as the technology complied with his invasive coding. From this angle, Keith could see his profile, silver light etching out the long slope of his nose, the sharp jut of his chin.

"Display star system map," he commanded.

The hologram obeyed with a mewling sound as the pixels jostled and tripped over each other to paint out the pin pricks of the stars they sat within. Keith couldn't chart any of the constellations that arranged themselves in the air before him. They were so vast, almost overwhelming the bridge with their luminescent breadth. It made Keith feel hopelessly miniscule within the universe for a moment. There was so much beyond what he could even imagine that it wasn't merely a case of him failing to understand it. He was also failing to conceive it.

And yet.

And yet, throughout the scope of the cosmos, he had managed to find Lance. A boy of soil and life stabbed into a random point in the galaxy for a reason yet unknown.

"Show Earth," Lance commanded anew.

His voice was hushed out of night time habit, but it still sounded coarse and husky. The words hadn't been polished before they'd left his mouth, and so Keith could hear all the unfiltered emotion that cut through them.

The console beeped apologetically. It had failed to locate Earth. The wasn't because the planet was difficult to find, Keith knew. It was a side effect of the alien language barrier - Alteans might have studied as far as Earth's galaxy, but their name for it and the planets within would be from a different tongue altogether. Earth was branded with an Altean title that Lance wasn't privy to.

The boy sighed quietly in a way that leaned towards frustration.

With more strain in his voice, he ordered, "Show the Milky Way galaxy."

The console beeped happily now that it had found an instruction it could comply with. The pixels on the screen filtered through and around each other under they emerged into a shape that Keith recognised. The image of the Milky Way suspended in gentle animation and glittering hues of blue was so familiar to Keith that his heart squeezed once with nostalgia and a second time with a pulsating sense of protection. Keith had distanced himself from calling it his home, but it was where he'd been born, and that fact carved itself a pocket inside his heart that could only be filled by the swirling shape he gazed at.

"Zoom in on the Orion Arm," Lance told the console.

The screen complied with a squeal of shifting iconographia. The scimitar curve of the Orion arm filled the bridge with a litter of stars so thick Keith could have swum through them. The winking lights of the constellations prodded an involuntary response in him; Keith reached out a hand to brush his fingertips against the wing tip of the Cygnet constellation. The cluster of stars illuminated his digits as he unfurled them towards it, exposing the shine of his Marmoran uniform. Keith shrank away from the light but the damage had already been done. His fingers felt like they'd been painted in light, and he trapped them against his chest to little avail.

Lance lazily turned his head to peer directly into the pool of shadow Keith had knitter around himself.

"I know you're there, Keith," Lance told him. "Your stealth is shit."

There was little point sticking to the safety of the gloom that blanketed him, and so as proudly as he could, Keith stepped into the light of the star map.

Lance watched him closely. His eyes looked like they'd been soaking up the hues from the hologram, the blue of his iris drinking in the saturation until they were dark and sated. Keith was aware that Lance knew how aggressive he could look with his bared snarling teeth and the clean cut of his jaw. He wasn't afraid of a challenge, and it was something he seemed keen for people to know. But in the dim of the bridge, Lance just looked tired. Too tired to fight, it seemed, as he said little else after calling Keith out of hiding. Though equally, it might have been the somberness that so usually came with night fall, along with the fact that it was 3am. The brightness of bickering was a practice to be indulged during the daylight hours when rest had recharged that fruitless energy.

"Hey," Keith began, for want of a better opener.

“You lost?” Lance quipped. There was an edge to his voice, but he seemed to lack the energy to follow through with it.

Keith quickly continued, "You searching for Earth?"

Lance looked back up at the hologram as he replied, "Trying to. I don't know if it's on the castle's system."

"It's on there," Keith assured him. "The Alteans had different names for the stars than us, so Pidge has been reprogramming some of them into the castle’s mainframe. I think Earth is saved it under 'Oriod 7-23'."

"Huh," Lance noted. Then to the console, "Show me Oriod 7-23."

The screen chimed as it complied. Keith watched with a misplaced thrill of anticipation as the pixels looped and span and wove themselves into the closest depiction of Earth he'd seen this side of the galaxy.

Aside him, Lance let out a breath that felt too long and too hard to have been real. It sounded like all the years he'd been at the Marmoran base had fled from his mouth the second he laid eyes on the screen.

The vision of the Earth hung like a phantom above their heads. The vectors of land rotated in ghostly blue etching as the globe span on its axis. Lance's eyes traced every outline of it, catching the threads of the countries with his eyes and the names of them with the murmur of his mouth. His jaw clenched and unclenched silently as his lips parted with some soft awe. It was a response that begged to be questioned.

Keith gave in to the urge. He asked, "You recognise it?"

Lance shuddered. Keith's question had invited sound and calamity along with it to intrude on a sacred moment. Lance didn't look annoyed at the interruption, he only looked weary.

Turning, he shot Keith a rueful half smile. "How long do you wanna bet I can keep everyone from asking?"

Keith shrugged. "Honestly, with Pidge and Hunk on your case? I'd say another day at most."

Lance snorted quietly, looking away from Keith to set his eyes once again upon the skeletal globe.

"I like Pidge and Hunk. They're goofy."

"They're more nosy than Shiro really gives them credit for."

Lance's smile grew into a markedly more genuine grin. "Yeah well, it's nice to be around other kids my age for once."

"You're around Blades your age," Keith noted.

Lance shook his head. He only turned away from the globe enough to shoot Keith a incredulous arch of his eyebrow.

"The Blades 'my age' are at least fifty years old. The Galra live longer than humans so that's what they consider _adolescence_."

"Oh."

Keith took a brief interlude to rifle through the faces of the Blades he'd met. His mind briefly scanned over the scars that spoke their story into the planes of Madam Hollo's skin. Keith had already thought her a seasoned veteran, but this new knowledge made him question just how long she'd spent fighting this holy war. How many years of her longer than average life had she spent like a toll, instead of cultivating nourishment and progression. He thought of Orok's boyish charm and polished wickedness. Not a child by any means, but perhaps younger than Keith had assumed. Chronology knocked against biology in Keith's head, battling for favour.

"You look worried," Lance chuckled. "Did you accidentally hit on some seventy year old?"

"I'm not you," Keith rebuffed.

"Yeah, I don't hit on seventy year olds."

Lance tilted his head in Keith's direction proudly.

"How old is Pidge?" he asked suddenly.

Keith hesitated to answer the question. The conversation was being led down a divergent path that Keith wasn't interested in exploring. The curiosity that had been simmering in the back of his mind for the past few months was raging into a boil that prickled behind his eyes. The only cure was a dousing of truth, and Lance was standing right beside him, cool and ungenerous.

"Pidge kind of reminds me of Orok," Lance mused again.

This gave Keith pause. It was an idea that had him lining up the counterparts, searching for similarities in a new angle of light.

Pidge was all sparks and Orok was gasoline eager to be lit. Together, they would be a contendable brand of friendly fire. Apart, they were a clever distraction that Lance spun around Keith like something shiny.

Keith cut right through it. "You're from Earth?"

Lance's smile slipped out of place then. His mouth hovered in a space just below smiling before it pressed flat.

He managed, "Yeah."

"Lance," Keith said.

The sound of his name was a ringing bell. It caught Lance's attention enough for him to turn and look at Keith.

"How did you get here?"

"Would you believe me if I said it was an accident?" Lance asked in return.

"It wouldn't surprise me. We got here by accident too."

Lance nodded as if he understood what Keith was saying very well. It would have been easier for him if the similarities ended there, but Keith let the silence stretch into the space around them like a balloon until Lance felt he had to pop it.

"My family is pretty big," Lance murmured. "Back on Earth. I have four siblings, they're all older than me."

The trajectory Lance had built rolled to a quiet stop. Without a word, he turned to approach the dais in the middle of the bridge. Within ten feet of it, Lance decided that it was a story better told sitting, and so he neatly folded his long legs into a nest beneath him. Keith copied him so they sat side by side, illuminated by the crystalline orb of Earth's hologram above them.

"My uncle owns a beach house in Varadero," Lance started again. "My and my siblings were playing hide and seek. I always used to win, they hated it."

Lance's mouth remembered how to smile at that, one corner hiking up to test out the shape of it.

"I wandered out beyond this ridge we weren't supposed to go near, and there was this light coming from the other side of it. I remember seeing this ship. It wasn't like anything I'd ever seen before, it was so weird and cool. And I wanted to know what it was, you know?"

Keith nodded like he did know. He had found the markings in the cave, after all. He couldn't fault curiosity, not when it itched somewhere deep in his cerebral.

Lance continued, "I remember going inside to explore. I couldn’t have been in there more than 30 seconds but..."

He stilled, taking in a shivery breath. When he let it out it was several seconds before he spoke again.

"The door closed behind me. It all happened so fast. One minute we were on Earth and then the ship was shaking like it was taking off. After that there was a whole lot of nothing, and then when the door opened I was on a completely different planet."

Keith looked at Lance, whose gaze was levelled helplessly on the hologram, and he tried to imagine what it must have been like to close your eyes and open them to a place so far beyond your world that your imagination couldn't have even stretched to it.

"How old were you?"

Lance's hands brushed down his hips in an aborted gesture. He looked like he was searching for pockets on a jacket he was no longer wearing.

"I was... Seven? Eight? It's kinda hard to remember. So much has happened since then."

"Eshka said you'd been with the Blade for about a decade," Keith prodded. When Lance frowned at the word, he added, "Ten decaphoebes."

The boy shook his head lightly, "Not quite that long. I think about eight, maybe?"

The calculation ran through Keith head once, twice, failing to add up.

"So you were on an alien planet for three years before you joined the Blade?"

Lance bobbed his head. It wasn't so much a nod of agreement as it was a gesture of regret.

"What were you doing?"

"What do you think I was doing?" Lance scoffed. "I was a weird Earth kid, there weren't exactly a lot of us running around. I was a rare find, you know? Everyone wanted a piece of this."

He arched a thumb at himself triumphantly, but the grin that slipped in with it was rueful at best.

Keith did know, but he didn't want to. He'd been to enough missions on black market swap moons to know there was an industry for rare finds. Lance’s jaw locked up, the juncture of his neck flexing with a roll of blue shadows.

Keith moved on. "What I don't understand is, how did you end up at the Blade?"

Lance rolled onto one hip, knotting his legs a little closer underneath him. "Maybe Antok will tell you some day. I wasn't exactly welcome. In the beginning, I mean."

"Hard to imagine that," Keith muttered.

Lance was a cornerstone of his experience at the Marmoran headquarters. To remove him from the memory would mean untangling a complicated web of familiarity that Keith had been wrapped in like gauze.

"I know. I make it look easy," Lance smirked.

He turned his head to shoot Keith a wink. The action made something hot and tingling charge up Keith's jugular. He was thankful to the blue light soaking the room which successfully hid the flush of his skin.

"You must miss your family," he breathed.

It was a fragile topic, and not one Keith felt skilled at handling. He could try to broach it and end up flattening the conversation with his ham fisted attempt. But where Keith was lacking in social tact, Lance met him with more patience then he was used to at this hour.

"Every day," Lance confessed. "You too?"

Keith shook his head. The question had been inevitable, but that hadn't stopped him from poking at that can of worms, daring it to tip over.

"I don't have a family, Lance. I'm an orphan."

The regret on Lance's face was immediate, his mouth dropping and his eyebrows crumpling together.

"Keith," he breathed. There was a sadness in the hush of his voice that made Keith's chest pump hot.

"It's okay," Keith told him quickly.

It wasn't okay, really. But it was all Keith had known for most of his life, and he’d gotten so used to the feeling of things not being right it was hard to imagine a time when it had been.

"But, your mum," Lance went on. "She's Galra. So she could still be out here, right?"

It was interesting that Lance had said 'here' and not 'there'. It reminded Keith that he was once somewhere and now he had left. He had become 'there', and looking back made him want to be 'there' again. Looking forward felt heavy with possibility.

Keith shrugged. "Yeah, it’s possible. Maybe I’ll get a chance to go look for her. After we defeat Zarkon."

“Or maybe she’ll come looking for you,” Lance suggested.

Keith held his breath. It was a dream he didn't often take out, too brilliant to admire appropriately. He only ever really examined the notion in the space between thoughts, between waking and sleeping where the burden of reality couldn't tread.

It was a difficult feeling to parse; missing a family you hadn't known. It leaned heavily on imagination, spinning the idea out of all the threads of yearning your heart was strung with. Keith didn't know anything about his mother beyond her race, and he lacked the scope of optimism to think what she may have been like. She must have been reckless, to have had a child with an Earthling. Keith wondered if it was the same strain of recklessness as his.

He kept his eyes trained on Lance's face, watching the reverent and melancholy way he looked at the Earth. He was different, after all. Keith had lost his family, but Lance had been stolen from his. Neither one was a choice, but Lance's could have been avoided. The thought pinched Keith's heart with an acute sense of tragedy.

"What were they like?" Keith broke the fragile silence that veiled them. "Your family."

Lance eyed Keith warily for a moment. It was a warmer gesture than Keith had expected, like he was checking Keith was okay before ploughing ahead with his story. Keith gave him an encouraging half smile, muted in the dull bloom of blue light.

"They were-" Lance wrapped his arms around himself tightly. The gesture wasn't lost on Keith; Lance's family must have been tactile.

"They were _loud_ ," Lance breathed. "I think that's the thing I miss the most. Space is cool but it's silent. I miss the noise and the chaos."

"Five kids does sound like a lot," Keith agreed.

It was all the encouragement Lance needed. His face split with a grin as he explained, "Oh man, that's not even the start of it. There was my aunt and my uncle, mi abuelita, abuelo on my dad's side. Family dinner was a nightmare."

Lance unfolded his arms as the stories came rushing out of him. Keith took a moment to appreciate the looseness of his posture, the relaxation of his cracked stoicism. It was Lance like he'd never seen him, open and free and _happy_. Keith felt as though he was seeing Lance, really seeing him as himself for the first time. It seemed so surreal, at a time of morning where the spaces between things bled into each other, and the boy leaked into the soldier.

Here were the things Keith had been told about Lance: He was human, he'd been abducted from Earth as a child, he was a skilled marksman and combat fighter. He was the closest thing to a Blade without being Galra.

Here were the things Keith had noticed about Lance: He was chatty. Chattier than he pretended to be, and half of that communication was done with his hands, long fingers curling into grasping cradles and arching in wide circles to emphasise his point. He cared deeply about other people. He was _goofy_.

The knowledge rubbed coarse against the observations in Keith's head, fracturing each other into mental shrapnel that slid around his mind.

"You're the baby," Keith chuckled as Lance lamented about how he was forced to sit at what he called "the kids' table".

"By _twelve minutes_ , Keith. It's a total injustice!"

Keith slowed, letting the words land on him once by one.

"Twelve minutes...?" he chewed the sentence, letting it take form. "Lance, are you... Are you a twin?"

Lance threw his hands up in the air. Keith had spent the past hour learning this new form of nonverbal communication. He would guess that Lance was somewhere between 'of course' and 'that's not the point', right in the middle of exasperation.

"Twelve minutes, Keith, my man. Rachel has twelve minutes on me and she _never_ let me forget it," he griped. "It's okay though because I'm prettier."

The admission clicked into place like a missing puzzle piece. Lance's intense stress on rivalry suddenly made sense with the backdrop of context. No wonder he fought so hard to one up everyone; he had nothing to lose and everything to prove.

"Oh yeah" Keith grinned. "And way more mature, I'm sure."

And then it happened, like it was the most natural thing in the world. A friend broaching familiar ground.

Keith reached out and patted Lance on the back, his palm flattened out against the planes of his shoulder. Lance stilled for a fraction of a second, his body lagging behind what it was doing and what it intended to do. And then he moved, his weight leaning into the touch like it was an anchor he'd fly away without. Keith's thumb twitched in its seat above Lance's shoulder blade. He didn't give into the impulse to rub soothing circles on the small patch of contact, but the urge was there. What he did do was squeeze his fingers a little, not gaining new ground, just fastening his hold.

They stayed like that for a dobash, Lance chasing the feeling of touch, Keith readily supplying it. To move his hand away would be to admit it had been there in the first place, and Keith wasn't ready to break the easy peace of simply acknowledging that he'd moved and something had happened. Lance seemed equally content to appreciate the change in silence.

That was until he asked, "Hey, Keith. Can I ask you something?"

If there was an opportunity to remove his claim to Lance's shoulder, that would have been it. Keith left his hand where it was.

"Sure."

"You said you think you're gay, right?"

Keith nodded. The conversation was swaying in a direction he was unsure of. He held onto Lance's shoulder a little tighter.

"How do you know?"

Keith looked through the hologram, beyond to the screen of stars painting the huge window of the bridge.

"I think it's just a feeling. I get along fine with girls but I just don't really see them as potential partners. With guys it's like... There's always something a bit more. Kinda like holding your breath. Like you're waiting for something."

Lance's brow furrowed deeply, his lips pressing together until they almost disappeared.

Keith's heart throbbed a shuddering beat in his chest. "Do you think you might be gay?"

"No..." Lance said the word slowly, unsure. "I think- I dunno, I think I like Allura..."

The 'but' lingered on the end of the sentence, waiting to be said. Keith waited as well, for Lance to say it.

Inevitably it came out. "But," Lance paused. "I think I feel like that about guys as well."

Keith's will broke with a tremble of his fingers, and he succumbed to the urge to rub a small circle into Lance's back with his thumb.

"Anyone specific?" he asked, not wanting the answer.

Lance turned to him, his dark blue eyes glinting shades of aquamarine. He was searching for something in Keith's face, something that was rousing to life on his lips.

He opened his mouth just as his face contorted, and he said, "Well… Shiro makes me feel...."

Something icy trickled through Keith's veins. His hand lost purchase on Lance's shoulder, slipping off the slope of his back and nearly hitting the floor.

Lamely, he said, "Shiro is... Definitely a guy."

"Yeah," Lance agreed.

He sounded just as dumbfounded at his own answer. Keith didn't know if it was because it wasn't what he'd meant to say, or if it was what he'd meant to say but speaking it out loud gave it a new spring of life that couldn't be revoked. Keith mirrored his surprise, but it swiftly hardened into something brutish and destructive.

Keith wasn't a child anymore, and he had the emotional intelligence to recognise Lance’s defensive tactics. But maturity did not equate control, and recognition did not stop Keith from opening his mouth to tear down the obstacle in his path.

"Shiro's engaged." he said flatly. "He has a fiancé back on Earth so he's not... Available. Like that."

It was an old truth. Which was to say, it had been true once, and Keith dredged up that hatchet to hold it high above his head in ugly triumph.

Lance expression folded, every smile and fond memory he'd spilled whistling back behind a papery wall of shelter.

"Oh," he said quietly.

The words felt acidic in Keith’s throat, and he did his best to swallow against the burn. Lance looked back to the hologram of Earth.

“Lucky guy,” he murmured.

Keith nodded. The action made his head feel heavy. “Yeah, the luckiest.”

Lance’s jaw worked, and he snatched his hand away from its resting place on the floor to cram it safely into his lap. His eyes looked as hard as flint in the beaming blue light.

“Well,” he said after a tense moment. “I’m beat.”

He sprang to his feet with more force than warranted at… What was it now? 4am? 5? He fixed Keith with a shatteringly bright smile. It looked far worse through the brittle atmosphere that had cracked around them, sickly sweet and too pointy at the corners.

“See you in the morning, Keith!”

And without another word, he turned on his heel, stretching his arms high above his head as he slid out of the bridge. Keith watched him go, a leaden sensation lining his stomach.

He felt a searing prickle of guilt flick his sternum. The memory of the vow he’d made to answer Lance’s questions nipped at the side of his thoughts, a frayed edge that was being tugged with the intent to unravel.

It was a selfish thing he’d done. Keith had never really thought of himself as a selfish person, but the thought of Lance pursuing Shiro grated a nerve that Keith didn’t even know he had. He sat in the quagmire of guilt and blue light for a few more dobashes before the atmosphere threatened to suffocate him. Drawing the biggest breath he could, Keith let it out between his teeth before standing and making his way back towards the dorms.

Perhaps Lance would leave things there, in the blue tinted bubble of twilight hours, in the place before the world wakes up. With any luck, Keith could leave his lie there, too.

 

***

 

Keith didn’t realise it until the following day, but the precious fragility of the early morning time he’d spent with Lance had become a catalyst. The other boy’s personality had begun leaking through the cracks of his Blade persona in trickles of touch and ripples of mischief.

It was small things at first, almost too small to notice had Keith not been paying close attention to them. Lance’s palm had found itself a semi permanent perch on Keith’s torso. It would fly in to land softly high on his shoulder, skimming the juncture of his neck. Sometimes it would slip, his fingertips creeping to the tender spot between Keith’s shoulder blades, scaling the low bumps of vertebrae there. It wasn’t an unwelcome development, but bridging the gap from verbal to physical was hesitant always. Keith would lean two degrees deeper into Lance’s palm, and Lance would in turn allow his hand to edge along the inches of Keith’s shoulders and back.

It was small.

But Keith wasn’t the only one paying attention.

Every time Lance reached out for him, Keith would feel the round portals of Antok’s mask searing holes into his skin. His tail would flick dangerously, fast as a whip. Worse still, he’d chuffed at Keith more than once, and only when Lance was out of the room. The rumbling cut of it made Keith jump in his skin each time, and he wrestled with the effort of containing his reaction. He was not particularly scared of Antok, but he was hardly eager to enrage one of the Blade’s heavy hitters. His sense of self-preservation jabbed into his sense of pride, and Keith jabbed his teeth into each other to ignore it.

“Hey,” Lance sidled up beside him, throwing an arm casually over the hook of Keith’s shoulder. “You wanna go get something to eat?”

It had been a particularly long mission briefing that morning. Kolivan had been pooling the Blade’s resources, hailing every available squadron for the coming attack. Shiro had been plotting out their approach to Beta Traz with Pidge, both of them bent over coordinates and star maps as they discussed how to utilise the Green Lion’s cloaking abilities.

Keith leaned into Lance a little, balancing their weight.

“Sure, let me get changed first though. Feels like I’ve been wearing this suit forever.”

Lance shot him a grin. “Well I wasn’t gonna say anything but you could use a wash, man. Starting to get a bit ripe there.”

Keith swatted him playfully, Lance letting out a delighted squawk. No sooner had he moved than Antok’s head snapped in his direction. He didn’t chuff, but Keith felt a shudder through the soles of his feet anyway.

“You guys wanna get lunch?” Lance called over the briefing table to Shiro and Pidge.

The two of them looked up, blinking owlishly as their heads shifted from strategy to socialising.

“Count me in!” Pidge chirped.

Shiro raised his eyebrows at her and she hopped towards Lance.

“Come on, Shiro. We’ve been going over these charts for hours. I could use some high quality food goo right about now,” she lamented.

It was a magic trick that only Pidge could pull off; getting Shiro to slacken his taut regime through moaning. Keith didn’t know if it was her size or her age, but he was sure it was definitely her relation to Sam and Matt Holt that had Shiro warping with compassion. Her family had always been close with Shiro, and it was a play that worked endlessly in her favour.

“Sure,” he smiled gently at her. “You guys go ahead.”

Lance’s grin fell a little. “You’re not joining us?”

“I’ll catch up with you guys after I finish here.” Shiro’s smile brightened, painting every inch of him into the role model he’d always been. “Great work today, Lance. You really helped us out with the infiltration points for Zarkon’s ship.”

The compliment went straight to Lance’s ears, staining them a deep pink. Keith chewed the inside of his cheek, leaning away from Lance’s touch just enough to give himself breathing room.

“Yeah, uh- No problem,” Lance bumbled. “Thanks, Shiro.”

Pidge tugged on Lance’s elbow, keen to leave the room. Lance turned with the pull of his suit, ruffling her hair in a way that earned him an indignant yelp. It was just as he reached the doors of the bridge that he turned and delivered a line that made Keith blood stutter.

“Oh! Shiro, congratulations on your engagement!”

Shiro’s head snapped up, his eyes going as round as dinner plates. Lance didn’t even bother waiting for a response, giving the man a little wave as Pidge dragged him towards the kitchen.

As soon as the doors swished shut behind them, Antok made a noise that Keith had never heard before. It was a shuddering rasp chopped with something that sounded like knocking on wood. With a whistling snap of his tail, he unfolded him arms and started towards the door.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Antok flung over his shoulder, his manners remembered at the last minute.

It left Keith in the brittle clutches of silence. He felt more than saw Shiro’s head drift over to look at him. There was a ripple of atmosphere that passed with it, thick and rolling like tar.

“Did Lance just… Congratulate me on getting engaged?”

“Yeah,” Keith grunted. “Seems like it.”

He was hoping that if his answers were short, the questioning would be shorter. But hope was fickle and Shiro was not, and he had the insight to spot Keith’s escapism a mile away.

“Okay,” he began patiently. “First of all, I’m not engaged anymore. Adam and I broke things off before I went to Kerberos.”

An old forgotten wire sparked behind Keith’s nerves, sensing a chance to ignite.

“I know that,” Keith said in a heated tone. “It’s not right, what he did to-”

“Keith, stop.”

Shiro raised his hand in a halting gesture. It worked instantly, and Keith let the argument die on his tongue. Shiro knew it was better to kill the assault before it started - If he left Keith to gain trajectory, he’d keep going for hours.

“Secondly, how did Lance know about my engagement?” Shiro asked.

Keith shrugged. The gesture was clipped, but the window for small answers had flown by at least thirty ticks before, and now Keith was left with a void to fill and nothing but shrugs to fill it. He knew Shiro would never be satisfied with that, but he still held the rough, marred truth from him with an iron clutch.

“I don’t know, it came up in conversation?”

Shiro remained silent, waiting for him to elaborate. Keith knew he was squirming, and that only made the microscope of his brothers gaze magnify.

“I told Lance you were engaged,” Keith said in a rush. Perhaps if he said the words quick enough, they’d bleed into a colour that Shiro would turn away from.

Shiro just watched him patiently. “Why?”

Keith shrugged. “Because you were once?”

“But I’m not anymore.”

Keith shifted his weight between his feet, caught sight of them shuffling, and abruptly stopped.

“He-” Keith took a steadying breath, the quietest one he could. “He asked if you had a boyfriend.”

“Oh,” Shiro blinked, thoroughly caught off guard.

Keith knew the flush that crossed the tips of his ears was flattery and not interest, but his gut did not, and it twisted violently until the edges of his vision turned pink.

“I didn’t realise Lance was-”  
“He’s bi,” Keith interrupted. It came out hotter than he’d intended. “I think. From what he’s said.”

Shiro just watched him, weighing out his words before they crossed his tongue.

“Sounds like you’ve been talking about it a lot with him,” he said carefully. “And he was asking about my love life?”

“Yeah.”

“And you told him I was engaged.”

Hearing it out loud was vicious in its clarity. Keith swallowed against the tightness of his throat. Something aching and metallic flooded under his tongue, and he hastily looked away. Shiro had a way of stripping things down to their basic form so that things were laid out in plain sight. It was useful when discussing tactics. When discussing emotions, it made Keith feel like he’d been flipped over, his soft vulnerable parts left open for attack.

“Keith,” Shiro started. It was in that tone of voice that made Keith cringe.

In all his time knowing Shiro, Keith had rarely heard him shout, and the few times he had it was usually out of fear or triumph. He’d only heard Shiro raise his voice once in anger, and that was a conversation that Keith shouldn’t have been privy to anyway. He’d have given anything for Shiro to shout now. There was familiarity in rage, Keith considered himself an expert. Someone threw rocks at him and he’d thrown them back with a snarl and a fiery purpose. The quiet compassion was so much worse. It would wrap itself around Keith until he stopped thrashing and hold him there until the fight drained out of him. It _itched_. Keith wanted to claw at it until it bled.

Shiro was staring at him softly, his voice hushed with understanding. It made Keith feel sick through his belly. He didn’t want Shiro to understand him. He could hardly bear the thought of being seen right down to his ugly thorny core. The balls of his feet rolled into the ground, ready to take flight.

“I know how badly you want to fight and to help people. But it’s okay to want things for yourself, too, outside of this war.”

“We don’t have that luxury,” Keith grunted. And then, to reaffirm his stance, “And I don’t want anything anyway.”

It was instantly incriminating. Keith shrivelled under the defensiveness of his own words. He didn’t know how much of what he was saying was true and how much was a long ingrained fight reflex, but either way, it was something he wanted to avoid discussing.

There was a soft clap as Shiro’s hand landed on his shoulder, preventing him from fleeing. It seemed like Shiro had been paying attention to the change in Lance’s demeanour as well.

“Keith, you know I believe in you and what you’re doing with the Blade. But I’ll be honest…” Shiro’s face darkened. “I was worried about you being on your own out there.”

Keith bristled under the touch. He felt strange under the implication of being ‘there’ rather than ‘here’, and he wasn’t sure which he wanted more.

“I’m glad you have someone watching out for you.”

“Watching out for me?” Keith echoed.

Shiro smiled, his grey eyes softening into shiny warm gallium. “A friend.”

Keith bobbed his head like he understood, but the term was taking its time to sink in. The word felt so novel to him that it took Keith a second to realise that he hadn’t thought of it in a primary sense for a very long time. The Garrison had been clustered with squads and classmates, Voltron had been a team, and Shiro had been family. The Blade were comrades.

But friends?

It was a term that was out of use. When Keith slotted it next to the image of Lance, he felt the two of them light up like a circuit had been completed.

“Yeah,” he coughed out the insufficient word. Feeling he should add more, he tacked on, “Lance is… Good.”

Shiro smile tilted, slipping a few notches down from sincere into a smirk.

“Maybe you should tell him that.”

“Wow, amazing tips from the smooth criminal himself.”

Shiro finally released Keith’s shoulder with a hearty laugh.

“I’m just saying!”

Shiro’s amusement was contagious, but it was his smirk that really fired Keith’s wicked streak.

“Didn’t you _thank_ Adam when he finally told you he liked you?”

Shiro’s laughter puttered into a staccato spluttering.

“Not on _purpose!_ ”

Keith landed a light punch on his brother’s shoulder. Shiro batted his hand away and offered Keith an elbow to the ribs for his trouble.

“Look, Lance doesn’t even like me,” Keith exhaled. The subject felt less condemning with the buoyancy of satire. “He said he likes Allura.”

Shiro whistled low and long. “He’s getting around pretty quick, huh?”

Keith grimaced. The idea of Lance ‘getting around’ squatted on a dormant part of his mind.

“Yeah well, he can do what he wants,” Keith folded his arms over his chest.

Shiro’s eyes flicked down to them. They were long worn armour that he was experienced with unfolding, and even more experienced in leaving intact. In this case, he simply pushed against the barricade, not trying to get in, just reminding Keith of his presence.

“We don’t always know what we want,” Shiro stated calmly.

He turned his head sadly to stare at the vast star map netted across the ceiling.

“Sometimes, not until we get it.”

 

***

 

When Keith at last changed his clothes, the immense relief he felt was palpable.

The Marmoran uniform had peeled so stickily off his body that it felt like he was shedding a hide. The cool air of his room that lifted the hairs on his arm reminded Keith what it was like to have skin again, to feel something other than the dark texture that was near permanently plastered onto his body.

The hot rivulets of water from the shower racing down his figure smoothed out the angry red indents from the suit, and the loose black shirt he put on after was so light that each shift of the fabric raised a sheet of goosebumps over his flesh. He’d only just pulled his old boots on when the insistent grumble of his stomach urged  him towards the kitchen with some haste. He cast a brief look over his scarlet flight jacket, still hanging neglected in the wardrobe before stepping out into the hall. There were already voices drifting from the open kitchen doors as he approached, excited and raucous.

As he stepped through the doors, he spotted Hunk doling out generous portions of a food with vivacious colouring. Pidge was chatting at a million miles a minute, and across from her, marked by the erratic blur of hand movements, was Lance.

He looked different to the dark beam that his suit usually sliced into the white backdrop of the castle. So different that it took Keith several blinks to understand what he was seeing.

Lance was wearing baggy jeans, the faded length of them pooling in a wash around his ankles. A pale top sat over his chest, barely visible underneath the curtain of khaki fabric that swamped his body. It was a parka, Keith realised, highlighted with brushes of yellow and dark green accents. It was the closest to human Keith had seen Lance ever look and the effect was astounding.

Without the indigo tones of their uniform to offset the palette, Lance’s skin looked like rich brown leather, vibrant against the pearly white of his smile. The shadows cupping his cheekbones looked lighter, less carved into his skin and merely brushing the surface. It lifted years from his face; he looked like an average teenage boy. In the context of the castle and the circumstance of war, it was an oddity that had Keith staring.

“Oh hey! Keith!” Lance caught sight of him gaping from the doorframe and lifted his hand in a beckoning motion. “Have you tried this?”

‘This’ turned out to be Frulian toboggan roll that Hunk was loudly lamenting hadn’t turned out right. Keith would have disagreed had he taken a moment to stop shovelling it in his face. The virile flavour of it crackling against his tongue felt like all of the good meals Keith had missed at the Blade rolled into one dish.

“Where did you get those clothes?” Keith asked once he’d inhaled half of his plate.

Lance glanced down at his jacket, tugging on a loose thread near the zipper.

“Uh, well, Allura like… Made me the jeans? Somehow? Space princess magic maybe? And I found this old shirt in the wardrobe in my room.”

Lance’s arm traced a line to the condiments stacked in militant rows in the middle of the table, and Keith’s eyes followed it.

“And the jacket?” he prompted.

Lance’s arm stilled, fingers still reaching for the spices.

“It’s uh- It’s mine. Regris brought a few things over from the base.”

Keith sat back to look at the jacket in full. The wear of the stitching most definitely exceeded the years Lance had been in space, the seams frayed and barely holding onto each other. The faded marks down the side spoke of someone repeatedly shoving their hands into their pockets. Someone who had wider hands than Lance. It had to be a hand me down, and the conquest of travelling beyond Earth’s atmosphere levelled it from a jacket into a relic. Keith was looking at a family history as well as a family future.

“I’ve been working on some upgrades for Green to boost her cloaking abilities,” Pidge chatted to them idly. “Hopefully I can boost her duration time up to a full dobash before the end of the week. It’ll make the Beta Traz mission a lot easier if we have extra time to drop you guys at the infiltration point.”

“Wow, Pidge! You’re pretty good at all this tech stuff,” Lance gurgled around a mouthful of toboggan roll. “I know a bunch of Blades that would kill for a chance to work on a Voltron lion.”

“That’s reminds me,” Hunk interjected. He’d been making sad puppy dog eyes at his portion of food for the past five dobashes, but he interrupted his melancholy to look up at Lance curiously.

“Have you been to see the lions yet?”

Lance’s spoon dropped onto his plate with a harsh clatter.

“I can see them?” he squawked.

“Yeah for sure, dude!”

Pidge looked over at Keith with an arch of her eyebrow. “Why don’t you go with Keith? He hasn’t been to see Red yet, right Keith?”

Keith nearly dropped his spoon as well.

He hadn’t seen Red at all since being back, but he had thought about her, briefly, when he thought no one was watching. The guilt that kicked him in the gut barged through the door he’d built in his mind, too, and he felt Red’s presence singe through it with a glowering throb. The beating heart of her bond slammed its weight against the shell of his skull, and Keith breathed out long and slow to steady himself. The surge of influx left him feeling a little dizzy. He wasn’t quite sure where he ended and Red began. It took a few ticks for the fiery flood to abate, and when it did Keith realised he’d been gripped the edge of the table so hard his fingers had been squashed into creamy white.

“Not yet,” he ground out between his teeth.

“Well what’s the hold up? I wouldn’t wanna keep her waiting any longer than you already have. She’s giving off all sorts of cranky vibes and it’s messing with Yellow,” Hunk urged him.

Keith nodded tersely. “Yeah, alright. I’ll go now.”

And with that he pushed off the table, dropping his cutlery noisily onto his empty plate.

“Lance, you coming?”

“Couldn’t keep me away,” Lance grinned.

He shot Pidge and Hunk a pair of finger guns as he followed Keith out the kitchen with a skip. The action was so human that Keith stared at him a little longer, his eyes skimming the inside of his wrist and the supple brown skin whispering out from under his sleeves. Keith only knew what that skin felt like in the passing of hands, the rush of knuckles knocking together. He wanted to know what it felt like on purpose. He wanted to press the pad of his thumb into Lance’s pulse and know that he was real, he was there, he wasn’t some elaborate dream Keith had concocted to help his transition into the Blade.

The walk down to the hangar was rife with an atmosphere Keith didn’t recognise. Lance asked questions about the lions, but they were sparse and cluttered with idle chatter that felt like it was more for himself than Keith.

“So you’re a pilot?”

“Yeah, I am. I was?” Keith tripped over his words. He was neither here nor there.

“Were you a pilot on Earth?”

“Yeah, I was enrolled in a military program.”

“You mean you wanted to go to war?”

Keith paused at the implication. He hadn’t really thought about going to war, even though he was being trained for military deploy. Joining the Garrison hadn’t been about war, it had been about-

“Shiro recruited me. He believed in me when everyone else just saw an orphan with an bad attitude. I’m who I am today because of him.”

Lance looked at Keith, his eyes shining. “Sounds like you and Shiro are pretty close.”

“Yeah,” Keith nodded. There was no way to vocalise what Shiro meant to him, so he simply said, “We are.”

Lance nodded and fell silent.  His hands fluttered at his sides, a silent message, Keith observed. It was incredible how Lance could talk even when he wasn’t saying anything. He was so fluent in body language that reading his expressions wasn’t challenging. Briefly, he opened his mouth, then thought better and closed it again.

The air between them was thick with their conversation from the previous night. Neither of them attempted to look at it, lest it threatened to show itself. Lance didn’t seem to know how to talk without bringing it up, so he stayed silent, chewing his lip into a swollen pulpy red.

Keith chose to focus on his footsteps instead. Each one took him closer to Red’s hangar, and the closer he got the louder the became, bloating in the back of his mind with a static bleating. She was pissed at him, Keith could tell. Pissed that he hadn’t come sooner. Pissed that he’d left in the first place.

 _It’s better this way,_ he thought in her direction, as loudly as he could. _The Blade is where I’m needed._

The response he got was the equivalent of a mental bitch slap. There wasn’t a coherent phrase attached to it, but Keith got the overwhelming notion of vehement disagreement and some jumbled cohesion of several pieces coming together as a whole.

 _That’s what we’re doing,_ Keith thought again. It was hard to press the words towards Red, she was so loud with her intent. _The Blade are helping Voltron and the Rebels._

Again, she didn’t respond with words, but the surging mess of fraught impression ebbed from his mind, leaving a thin slough of something with a bitter aftertaste.

_Disappointment._

The word sank leaden into the base of Keith’s skull. He lifted one hand to press his fingers into the divot there, trying to alleviate some of the pressure.

“You okay there, buddy?” Lance asked with a frown. “Something wrong with your mullet?”

“It’s not a mullet,” Keith argued.

“Looks like a mullet to me.”

And then Lance reached out and threaded his slim fingers into the long choppy locks of Keith’s hair. Keith was so surprised he stopped walking immediately.

He’d always assumed Lance would run hot. The boy had so much energy that sometimes it felt like Keith could see it bouncing back and forth behind his skin, radiating in every cell of his body. But the tips of Lance’s fingers were cool as they grazed the nape of Keith’s neck. It was so brief and whisper light that for a tick Keith thought he may have imagined it.

That was until Lance snatched his hand back with a mumbed, “Frax, sorry. I dunno what I- Sorry.”

He tucked the disobedient limb behind his back and cuffed it securely into place with the fingers of his other hand gripped his wrist.

“Yeah,” Keith forced himself to start walking again. If he couldn’t speak properly he could at least substitute a decent walk. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

Lance kept his hands clasped firmly together the rest of the way into the hangar. They were so close now that Red’s presence in the back of Keith’s mind had crescendoed into a ringing in his ears. It was so distracting that it took him a moment after the doors had opened to realise that they weren’t the first ones there.

Allura turned to face them as they entered, her head whipping around in a cloud of silver strands.

“Oh! Lance!” she cried in soft surprise. And then, in a harder tone of voice, “Keith.”

Lance sailed over the slowing atmosphere with a chipper, “Hey, Allura.”

Keith tried to latch onto his lead and let Lance pull him over the wall the princess was building between herself and them. “Allura. It’s good to see you.”

“Indeed,” she replied curtly without looking him in the eye.

It was clear she didn’t intend to change that soon, so Keith glanced up at Red towering above them. She was, as usual, a terrifying and wonderful sight. Even prouder than Keith remembered her. Her armoured body sang with vibrant crimson tones, the chips that skimmed over the colour offering a brief stutter in the tune. There were some marks that Keith remembered making, and some he recognised from before he’d even piloted her. A fond heat throbbed around his mind like an embrace.

“Hey, Red,” he murmured, and the embrace tightened.

“Keith was just showing me his old lion,” Lance chatted away. “Pidge and Hunk thought I might like to see and boy, am I happy they suggested it. She’s a beauty!”

Lance beamed up at Red appreciatively. The yellow of her eyes gleamed a little more intensely at the praise, and Keith felt a playful tug under all that fondness. It was like she thought Lance was… Cute.

“Are you a pilot as well, Lance?” Allura’s question successfully snagged that divergent thought before Keith could wander too far down the trail of thinking.

Lance blinked at the question, surprised. His mouth opened automatically, no doubt to respond with something cheeky or polite or a mixture of both when he stopped. His brow wrinkled as he took a moment to truly ponder his response. A sheer draping of awe crossed his expression as the answer came to him. Keith got the impression he was witnessing the rediscovery of a memory.

“I’m not, no, but… I did want to be a pilot once. I kinda forgot about it.”

He chuckled sheepishly, a hand rubbing the back of his exposed neck.

“That’s a shame,” Allura soothed him. “You might have been able to pilot one of the lions.”

Keith felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. He’d known that in his absence, the team would have needed to find a new pilot for Red. But there was a difference between knowing and having that knowledge carelessly tossed in his face. Red wrapped herself wider around his mind, trying to build a warm blanket over his tumultuous emotions.

“That would be awesome!” Lance cried, his eyes glittering with the idea. “But I mean, Keith can just take me out for a spin. Right, Keith, buddy?”

If Keith hadn’t liked the idea of someone else flying Red then Allura certainly did not enjoy the thought of him piloting her anymore. She was so taken aback by Lance’s suggestion that she actually took a step forward, one hand lifting in an aborted halting gesture. A low rumble shivered through their feet, drawing them all into stillness. The trio glanced up at Red as the gentle shuddering of a purr coursed about the hangar. The glint in her eye had returned, shining and exciting. Keith’s fingers curled at his side as he remembered what it was like to coil them over her controls and feel the ancient power thrum through the cockpit.

“I suppose that would be okay,” Allura said carefully.

She was watching Keith with some hard curiosity. Her discontent still held her steady, but there was a keenness to her gaze that felt weighty and calculating. Like she was looking at him through a different lens and seeing the smaller parts of him. Keith was at a loss. He didn’t know how to bridge the widening gap between him and Allura, he only knew how not to. And flying one of her lions for the sake of petty nostalgia seemed like it fell into the latter category.

In an minor ditch effort to placate her, Keith suggested, “I’m not the Red Paladin anymore. I don’t even know if Red will let my fly her.”

The purring stopped abruptly, but only because the great war beast was moving. Red answered Keith’s feeble diversion by lowering her head until her chin skimmed the ground and opening her metallic maw in invitation. Keith mentally glowered at her. Red just batted the hostile thought away like it was a feather.

“Woooooooooah,” Lance breathed.

Before anyone could stop him, Lance’s long legs had carried him at least four strides up to the cockpit. He only paused once he could reach up to balance his weight against Red’s upper jaw with one hand, turning to shoot Keith a diabolical smile. He was more animated than Keith had ever seen him. This cheerful bouncy version of Lance was surely closer to the person he was without the weight of war, the person he should have been. It struck Keith with the realization that he really could be friends with this version of Lance. He was kind, righteous, vivacious. Just _young_ in a way Keith thought he never had been.

Lance had something that Keith had been missing for years: Joy

From the jaws of the huge lion, Lance called, “You coming?”

From the bottom of the gangway, Keith caught a taste of it; the joy. It was intoxicating and close enough to touch. He spared Allura a cursory glance in the hope that she wouldn’t thoroughly murder his blooming good mood, only to see that she’d averted her eyes. Her gaze remained firmly on the doors to the hangar.

“You know it,” Keith replied, and the steps he took up to the cockpit felt like he hadn’t even taken them.

 

***

 

There was something about piloting an ancient alien war ship that gave Keith a near nauseating headrush. It might have been to do with the trip switch of power he’d stumbled over in his haste to get into the cockpit, but the sensation of Red booting herself into life under his touch was, frankly, an elevating amount of gratification.

She felt just the way he remembered, the controls stiff and solid as he tested their flexibility. Red’s entire hull boomed with the roar she emitted. Keith could feel it shake down every vertebrae to settle in the base of his spine, tingling and needy.

“Easy, kitty,” he crooned, tapping his fingers over a series of buttons.

“Woah, what does that do?”

Lance had already jammed a finger into a random button by the time Keith looked over. It gave him just enough time to feel a flicker of trepidation before Red shuddered and released a fizzing cloud of smoke.

Lance grimaced under Keith’s scowl. “Sorry.”

“Just hold on to the back of the seat and don’t touch anything,” he barked.

Lance bared his canines but at least had the foresight to grasp the head of Keith’s chair. Keith pressed the controls forwards, easing out the tension in the gears. Red’s body rolled with a loud creaking, all her articulations squeezing against each other to shake off the disuse. Keith could feel the ease of it touch against his mind: Red had been bored.

She leaned against his thoughts, pushing images in his direction. They all shared a common theme; speed.

Keith chuckled low and wicked under his breath, “Okay, girl, let’s see if you’ve still got it.”

With a tug of the controls, Red shot forward out of the hangar doors with a point to prove. Lance screeched loudly, his hands slapping a frantic grasp as they slipped from the pilot’s chair. Keith let out a long whoop, the sting of euphoria too bright to contain in his being. The stars blurred into a single technicolour canvas as Red looped and span and rolled them. She was tumbling through Keith’s psyche; every spare thought he had she rose up to meet, until he was barely twitching the joysticks for her to comply.

“What do you think?” Keith yelled over the sound of Lance’s wailing.

“I think you’re crazy!” Lance cut himself off to yell back.

“Oh yeah?” Keith dived towards the challenge that hadn’t been issued. “Watch _this!”_

He jerked the joysticks back towards his body and felt Red haul herself up, up, up, her back arching as they went head over heels and then back around.

“Oooh nononononono!” Lance shrieked.

His hands found greater purchase as they looped around the back of the chair and grasped onto Keith. He ducked his head so low that Keith could see nothing but the whorl of his hair poking up. But he was laughing, and the sound of it was a virus that affected Keith on a cellular level. He could hear himself coughing out deep bellied peels of laughter over the whirring of Red’s engine, louder than he’d ever heard before. He felt like he’d uncorked a potent source of glee, and the novelty of it made him punch drunk.

Keith only began to slow down once Lance’s laughter descended into breathy gasps that he couldn’t quite keep up with.

“Having fun yet?” Keith asked over the back of the seat.

Lance’s head emerged, his eyes wide with wonder and the corners creased with cackling.

“Dude, you gave up _this_ to join the Blade? You’re out of your mind.”

The appraisal made Keith’s tongue taste suddenly sour. The ecstasy of flight leaked from his veins like he’d hit a tap, leaving a heavy lifeless aftershock.

“Well, the Blade need me more. And I wanted to learn about my Galran heritage so…”

The reason felt lame and inconsequential when held up to the light, paling to the luminescence of flying Red. But Lance nodded his head lightly, letting the action communicate his understanding.

“It’s a family thing, I get it. I wonder about mine, too.”

Keith offered him a half smile. There was common ground there, and they were both toeing at it, waiting for the other to take a step.

As usual, Keith took a leap without looking.

“You wanna fly her?”

Lance’s eyes made a very long expedition from Keith’s face, down to where his hands encircled the controls, up to the ambient star field through the windshield, then back to Keith’s face.

“Are you serious?” he breathed.

In response, Keith stood up from the pilot’s seat, sliding around it to join Lance as he motioned to the chair. Like magnets in motion, Lance slid the rest of the rotation to settle into the pilot chair. At first, he seemed unsure of what to do, his body curling inwards to reduce his impact on the environment. The controls quivered slightly, slipping towards him eagerly like flowers towards the sun. Lance politely rested his hands over them, not quite gripping them. When the seat shoved both of them backwards to make room for the extra length of his legs, Lance hiccuped out a gasp of surprise.

“Go on, pilot,” Keith encouraged him. The look Lance gave him was wide and electric. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

If Keith had set off dynamite in his own hands, it may have been less explosive. The words were like the crack of a whip, and Lance seized the joysticks with a loud whoop of excitement. Red had been eager to fly with Keith, but she wanted to impress Lance. The opportunity to show off was there and she pounced on it with a fervour Keith had only felt once before, though with the security of manning the controls.

This time, he barely managed to snatch a hold on the back of the pilot’s chair before the Red lion was zipping off all leagues of the star system.

“Man, this girl can _move!”_ Lance howled over the churning gait of the ship.

Keith felt like his lungs were battling with his stomach over which was able to eject itself from his body first.

Between ragged tense gasps, he rasped out, “You! Are the worst! Pilot! _Ever!_ ”

Lance yanked Red to the side violently, he body spinning in a death roll. “Oooh, are you scared?”

Keith wondered if Lance would feel so smug once his question was answered by the violent expulsion of Keith’s lunch into his lap. It took Keith nearly slipping unconscious from the safety of the chair for Red to finally slow down. He could feel her self satisfaction jabbing annoyingly into his mind like it was soft fat.

“Can I get me one of these?” Lance asked as he stroked the armrests reverently. “I think a ride like that every month could stop me from aging.”

“Yeah and then you’d be stuck at seventeen forever,” Keith pointed out glumly.

“I’m eighteen thanks,” Lance pointed back. “And it’s not like I can finally get my young adults card or whatever.”

“Are you talking about fake ID?”

“I dunno. That’s an Earth thing, right?”

“You’re an Earth thing.”

“And you’re drunk on G-forces, seems like,” Lance leaned forward to tap something into Red’s display. A homing beacon for the castle pinged to life on the side of the screen. “Maybe I should fly us back?”

Keith’s nature demanded that he argue, he was a fully trained Garrison pilot and a former Voltron paladin, he had credibility. But the diagonal set of his stomach pushed a ball of tension into his throat that successfully corked any debate he might have had.

Mutely, he nodded, leaning a little more heavily into the stable frame of the pilot’s seat. The journey back was, thankfully, no more than a casual cruising speed. Keith felt his blood begin to pump normally again, and that allowed his brain to stimulate proper conversation.

Especially as Lance asked, “So what’s going on between you and Allura?”

“What?” Keith slurred. “Nothing. There’s nothing going on between me and Allura. She’s made it clear she hates me.”

“Well, why does she hate you?”

Keith shrugged, the action stiff as the tension crept in. “Probably because I’m part Galra.”

Lance turned in his seat to give Keith the full effect of his frown. “But she’s working with the Blade of Marmora, and they’re all Galra.”

Keith shrugged again. It was a question he mostly knew the answer to, but to say it aloud seemed like it was trivialising it, and that didn’t feel good either.

Lance regarded him for a long moment, his eyes flitting in quick small jumps over each of Keith’s features. In a slow gesture, he reached around the seat to cup the side of Keith’s arm. The movement pulled the long khaki sleeves up his forearm to expose the tender patch of skin inside his wrist.

“She’ll come around, you know.”

Keith smiled weakly. Lance’s faith would be easy to transfer were Keith not so resistant to both faith and ease in the first place.

“Thanks, Lance.”

Considering it was Lance’s first time flying, he managed to settle Red back down into the hangar with relative finesse. The great beast wobbled slightly as Lance’s confidence with the controls wavered in kind, but Red settled down to the floor with only a moderately loud clunk. Lance seemed aware of the heavy handedness, if his sheepish grin was anything to go by.

“You picked up the controls pretty quickly,” Keith remarked.

Lance grinned spectacularly, and then had to ruin it with bravado. “I’d say beginner’s luck, but I’m really just that talented.”

Keith rolled his eyes, but in an affectionate way. The high from flying had run an electric current through his veins, and he could feel the voltage pulsing in time with his heart. It made him feel giddy, and he could see a reflection of that feeling in the brightness of Lance’s smile. The tall boy was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet as they rolled down the gangway from Red’s mouth. It elevated Keith above the burden of his worries. He felt less armoured, sated for something he hadn’t known he was hungering. It was a dangerous feeling, he thought, to have both him and Lance amped up on adrenaline. It felt like putting fire beside gasoline and daring them not to ignite.

Was this what friendship always felt like? Keith wondered.

It wasn’t the relaxed ease he had with Shiro, nor the rolling banter and hardening trust he had with Pidge and Hunk. This felt crystalline. Smooth with the withdrawal of walls, tapered into sharp edges that they could rebuff. Keith felt like he could knock his words against Lance and have them knocked back in a sharp witted volley. A constant game of one upmanship that he felt excited to win.

“We seriously need to do that again sometime,” Lance chattered to him as they made their way down the halls in search of the kitchen.

Flying dredged up and appetite by throwing your stomach forwards, and it could only be remedied by eating enough to settle it back into place.

Keith chuckled, but not because he found Lance’s request particularly funny. It was because Lance’s joy was infectious and Keith felt it like a terminal injection.

“Maybe we can bribe Shiro into letting us take Black for a joyride.”

Lance’s eyes got very round at the suggestion. “You think he would?”

“I think we could convince him,” Keith grinned.

He was so busy dosing up on Lance’s viral smile that he nearly missed broad cement cut of Antok’s torso. Keith whipped around just fast enough to avoid snubbing his nose on the hard dark armour, and then stepped back faster to avoid being stepped on by the massive Galra.

“Woah,” he hissed under his breath, fighting to right himself.

Antok’s mask had finally been removed, but his hood remained up, casting shadows over his brow. From beneath, his yellow eyes glowed more virulent.

Antok offered a clockwise tick of his head in Keith’s direction as acknowledgement before he lifted his chin to look at his adoptive brother.

“Lance,” he started, the name clipped to a stub. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Oh hey, Antok.” Lance’s grin didn’t seem infectious to Galra after all as he beamed up at his stone-faced brother. “Keith took me for a spin in the Red Lion. You’ve gotta give it a go, that thing packs some serious horsepower.”

Antok’s mouth made a displeased shape. “I don’t know what a horse it.”

Lance smile slipped at one corner. “Oh, uh, it’s like a four legged Earth animal that you can ride?”

Antok looked so unhappy that his expression bordered on a grimace. It caught Keith at an odd angle as he struggled to name it. He recognised it; the defensive aggression - You couldn’t be blindsided by hurt if you struck first, after all. It was something he’d grown out of, but Antok looked like he was experiencing it for the first time. He was unable to keep his hands from bunching into fists. The single canine that peeped out from beneath his top lip pierced the dam on Keith’s vocabulary, and the word came flooding through his thoughts with a drowning clarity.

_Jealousy._

Keith glanced between Antok and Lance. Antok glanced between Lance and Keith. Lance glanced anywhere but the two of them. Keith half expected Lance to offer more information on the subject, since he’d been so forthcoming about the things he’d learned at the Blade. It made sense that he might be the same in reverse.

But Lance looked like his jaw had lost the ability to work, as the muscles of his neck flexed rapidly. It was remarkable how quickly his bright mood had burned out, leaving the atmosphere around them airless and gasping, like the sensation you get after a very large explosion. He had been flying high, suspended by the elation of soaring through the stars, and so now when he was faced with the confrontation of his displeased brother, he had no words to bridge the space between them. Their moods were too opposite.

“What did you need Lance for?” Keith broke the silence in Lance’s place.

Antok didn’t even offer him the courtesy of a look in his direction, his gaze was fixed on Lance.

“You smell like humans,” Antok grunted after a moment. The words were an accusation and they hit the broad target of Lance’s ego messily.

Lance flinched like he’d been struck.

He opened his mouth to answer and Keith could practically see the words spilling from his tongue before he’d even said them.

_I am human._

But they didn’t come. Lance stopped abruptly, his eyebrows lifting in surprise before he swallowed the response on his lips. Keith watched the bob of his Adam’s apple and imagined the statement falling away, back down into his body where he could crush it in darkness.

Instead, he said, “Did you need me for something?”

His voice was hoarse, cut ragged with the effort of dissolving a hard truth. It made Keith’s sternum rattle with a warning that wanted to jump out of his throat and bite Antok somewhere that would hurt.

“Come with me,” was all the large Galra offered before he strode forward, making sure to step deliberately between the two of them.

With a snap of his tail, he coiled the end of it around Lance’s forearm and pulled him jerkily away down the hall. Lance grunted with the harsh handling, but he managed to shoot Keith a startled look over his shoulder before Antok whisked him around the corner.

“See you later, I guess,” Keith spoke aloud to the corridor.

The acoustics shuddered back a hollow mockery of his words, and so Keith turned on his heel and left the empty hallway, in search of more hospitable company.

 

***

 

Keith did, in fact, see Lance later.

Antok might have abducted the boy for something pressing, but even he couldn’t justify stretching mission briefings over designated mealtimes. Galra and humans had the common ground of being pack animals, and so eating together was a instinct first and a courtesy second. So when Lance and Antok filtered into the dining hall after Allura and Coran, Keith’s eyes immediately tracked the two dark strokes of them.

Antok walked tall and proud, as he usually did, but there was an agitation that followed behind him in the jittering swishes of his tail. Lance kept pace and kept close, as he usually did too, but there was a stiffness to his chatter that made his gabbing stall with every fevered snap of Antok’s tail. It wasn’t long before his eyes found Keith’s across the room, and he let slip a muted smile that only curved one half of his face; the side facing away from Antok.

Keith had been at the Blade long enough to know that Lance was a versatile soldier. He specialised in sharpshooting, excelled even. But give him an order and half a varga, and he’d spin through a wheel of competent skills to find one that matched the task he was given. Just because Lance was adept at many things, it didn’t mean he was good at them. Which is why he wasn’t fast enough to mask the jump his body gave when Antok’s tail swept close enough to brush his back. Lance recovered enough to give the big Galra a half hearted punch to his arm, but that too was measured, like he wasn’t sure if it was still allowed.

Keith spared Lance the decision of choosing his seat by kicking the leg of the chair next to him hard enough for the whole thing to wheel out at an angle in clear invitation. Lance shot a hurried glance at Antok, but the soldier was already striding towards the other end of the table. His mask was still down, which was a rarity in itself, but his hood had also been pushed back so that it pooled down his shoulders, allowing his ears to arch an extra few inches over his head. He stopped at the chair opposite Keith, gave him a once over, before very deliberately sitting down. Unlike the cheap metal of the Marmoran mess hall, the sturdy Altean dining chair did not sag under his weight, which meant that Antok was rewarded with another few extra inches of height that he surely could have spared. Keith merely glanced over at him before glancing away. He would not reward Antok further by giving him the satisfaction of a challenge. He instead rested his attention on the way Lance slipped almost silently into the seat next to him, shooting Keith a sheepish grin that still only sat halfway across his mouth.

“Hey, man,” he started. His tone was more upbeat than his smile, but he wasn’t very good at reconciling those either. “Sorry I had to dash. You know how it is, Zarkon waits for no man.”

Keith thought that was a very generous way of saying he had no control over Antok literally dragging him away, but saying so out loud seemed nothing but provocative. And since it was a mealtime, it was also a time for courtesy.

So, courteously, he said, “No problem.”

Keith nudged a bowl of food in Lance’s general direction. It was brimming with small twisted morsels that split the hue between crimson and fuchsia. That was, save for the dent Pidge had made in it serving herself a generous portion.

“Try those,” Keith told him. “You like spicy things, right?”

Lance did, Keith knew already. Paying attention to Lance’s behaviour  encompassed his eating habits, too, and Keith had unwittingly noticed that Lance donned his most charming smile whenever they served something spicy in the mess hall.

This observation turned Lance’s ears a similar colour to the morsels.

“Yeah,” he agreed dazedly. Then belatedly, “Thanks.”

His fingers inched towards the bowl, but they weren’t quick enough to grab it before Antok lunged out and snatched it from his reach with a rapid choppy bark. Both Lance and Keith froze at the sound. Antok blinked; he seemed equally surprised at the noise he had made, and one ear flicked like it was brushing itself clean of imposters. The movement shattered the spell of stillness over the two boys. Lance’s face slackened into one of mild annoyance. In a heavy gesture, he held out his hand for the bowl.

“Antok?” he prompted.

Antok glanced between Lance’s hand and the bowl still cradled in his hefty grip. His knuckles flexed, testing the strength of the bowl, and Keith briefly contemplated whether or not he was considering breaking it. They were all spared having to clean that up by Antok begrudgingly releasing the bowl back into Lance’s waiting hand. Lance slid his fingers under the base of it, hooking his thumb over the lip, and Keith caught a glimpse of the inside of his wrist peeking out from the edge of his sleeve.

“Thank you,” Lance said slowly as Antok’s hands fell away from the food.

Keith eyed the way Antok’s mouth cut a sour little line through his face as Lance doled a hearty spoon of food onto his plate. Keith knew by now that it wasn’t in Antok’s nature to verbalise his discontent, but the breadth of his form unwittingly created his own orbit, and the displeasure exuded outwards from him in one steady pulse. It was very much in Lance’s nature to say something aloud, but there was a tension between the two of them that wired his mouth shut and repelled his eyes from making direct contact with Antok’s.

At the head of the table, Allura watched the exchange with stilted distress - It was in her nature to broker peace, but since Galran relations were an area the she actively spurned, she seemed unsure of how to propose their kinship. Shiro managed to bridge the gap with an old tactic - he smoothly moved the topic onto something else.

Turning to Pidge beside him, he asked, “How’re those upgrades coming on Green?”

Pidge’s eyes gleamed a little behind her glasses. Keith could see the technical babble calculating it’s way up to her lips as she grinned.

“Great so far! I’ve managed to get her up to a full dobash so the drop off to Beta Traz shouldn’t be as close.”

Shiro grinned back encouragingly. “That’s good to hear. A clean infiltration is key to the success of this mission.”

The spoon Lance was holding rattled noisily against his teeth as he bit into the meal.

Around a mouthful, he asked, “When are we heading out?”

Shiro turned to look at him, his grin still in full force. Lance put his spoon down abruptly.

“In two movements. We’ll wormhole as close as we can before deploying you and the others in the green lion.”

“Wormhole?” Lance frowned, his jaw working like he was tasting the word for the first time. “Like warping?”

Surprisingly, it was Antok who responded. The breaking of his stubbornly silent demeanour made Hunk jump a little in his seat, and then flush heavily with embarrassment.

“The Alteans were pioneers of teludav technology. It was often used to deliver charitable aid and resources, as well as being a method of bridging great distances between ambassadors.”

Allura stared at him with laser focus. “You seem to know a lot about Alteans.”

The corner of Antok’s mouth twitched. It wasn’t remotely close to a smile, but it had the air of rueful amusement all the same.

“I studied the history of the Galran Empire and its relationship with the Kingdom of Altea. I believe it important to understand the origin of a war before pledging oneself to the cause.”

Allura blinked in surprise even as Coran next to her nodded sagely.

“Well it’s good to know that there’s still some people out there that remember the Old Altea,” he mused. “Both the Galra and the Alteans were great partners in civilisation back in the day.”

Antok lowered his head. It was a distinctly humbled gesture for a warrior of both his calibre and his demeanour.

“I hope we will be able to restore that tenet some day.”

Allura’s eyes shone as she blinked again, and she hurried to tuck a loose strand of her silver hair behind her ear. The gesture briefly shielded her eyes from view, and when she removed her hand they were matte once again. She remained silent, though, and it opened up a vacuum in the conversation.

“I believe we will,” Keith spoke directly to her.

Allura’s gaze snapped to his, wide and cerulean and glittering. Her lips quivered, and she pressed them together harshly.

Lance’s attention flicked between the two of them before he concurred, “I do too.” Then, turning to face Allura, he spoke with uncharacteristic gravitas. “If we all work together.”

Allura eyed him warily. The tips of Lance’s ears darkened, but his face remained stern. It was a rather impressive colour on him, Keith thought, and the sight of it made his heart swell.

Allura did not appear to share the sentiment. Her conviction was one of the many qualities Keith admired about her, but when it came to working with Galran allies, she was understably prudent. In the case of Keith, Allura seemed convinced that he was someone she did not recognise. The separation from team Voltron had obviously done little to ease that fact, but she had worked with them all closely for months. The thought that she no longer understood him was painful.

And as she looked at Lance, her face shifted into something Keith had felt before. Her brows pinched together and her mouth wrinkled at the corner. She looked as if she no longer understood Lance either. It was a fleeting expression. With a neat flick, Allura folded her napkin into a clean shape and placed it beside her plate.

“If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll turn in for the evening,” she told them.

She was out of her seat before anyone could comment on her departure. Keith watched her leave, but more than that, he watched Lance observe her exit. The boy’s lips rolled together tightly, and his fingers fidgeted against one another. Very briefly, he glanced at Keith out the corner of his eye. It was a loaded look, like a gun about to fire in a random direction.

And then Lance smiled. It was the loose sort of smile he saved for when he hit a bullseye or bested another Blade in training. Keith felt a surge of both accomplishment and terror. It was amplified by the whip sharp flick Antok gave his tail, and Keith was reminded that he was skating an edge here. This wasn’t a game, and he wasn’t playing.

“Please excuse me, too,” Antok said flatly.

The sound of his chair scraping against the floor when he stood was shrill and grating, and it made Keith’s teeth vibrate. The air was thick as fog and he wasn’t sure he wanted to breath it in.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Shiro naturally coasted past the tension. “We should all get a good night’s sleep. We’ve got an important mission ahead of us and we need to be in peak condition.”

Antok nodded once, a short stunted movement. It looked like an automatic response, rather than an actual acknowledgement. Keith wasn’t sure if he was even really listening, or if he’d just been waiting for Shiro to finish speaking before he could turn to leave.

Lance watched Antok leave the dining hall, too, but this time with a weighty resignation. He might have said something, but it seemed he didn’t have the words.

“On that note,” Hunk piped up. “I’m beat. Been working on Yellow all day and he’s worn me out.”

Keith nodded his understanding, his head ducking a centimetre further as he felt Red lean against his mind. He leaned back, fondly, before pushing away. It was an indulgence that he was afraid of developing a taste for, so it was better to remove the temptation all together. She slipped from his thoughts with a lingering breath of sadness, one that made Keith’s skin feel heavy on his bones.

“Me too,” he mumbled.

Lance stood up at the same time as him. It was a strange sense of mirroring, as Keith reached his full height and Lance went a whisker taller.

“I’ll come with you,” he told Keith. At the red paladin’s confused expression, he added, “Our rooms are in the same direction.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Keith looked across the table to where Pidge and Shiro still sat together. The two of them wore twinning expressions of vague smugness. Keith returned a vague scowl, and together they held a watered down silent conversation.

“Good night you two,” Shiro told them.

Pidge, with significantly more glee, added, “Sleep well.”

Keith gave her a less than vague scowl on his way out the dining room.

 

***

 

It was 3am.

Keith was pretty sure this time around. He’d been back on the castle ship enough days to regain his wobbly grasp on Altean time signatures. Now, the symbols mocked him in glowing teal script from across the other side of the room, flicking over themselves at a snail’s pace. Keith felt an urge to growl at them, but the rattling chatter of it failing to gain any traction in his throat. The effort of sitting up alone had his back aching down the full curve of his spine.

He wasn’t sure why he’d woken up, but the realisation came to him in sensory memories and dreamy concepts rather than fully formed ideas.

It was simply too quiet. The desert back on Earth had held an entirely new strain of life when the sun went down - coyotes would sing to each other, the rain would murmur to Keith through his semi consciousness, the wood of the house would creak and sigh as it pushed against itself - and all these noises together made a lullaby of nature that blanketed an overwhelming sense of familiarity and comfort. Keith hadn’t thought much about it when he’d begun sleeping on the castle ship. But being amongst the barracks at the Blade had composed a new ballad of sleep - the rhythmic sight of multiple breaths, the tinny choking of the pipes, the neon hissing of the dim violet lights.

Now that he’d returned to having a room to himself, Keith found the sensation distinctly isolating. Without anyone else to share the space, the bedroom became a cocoon of silence, wrapping him in a soundproof bubble that filled itself with immense pressure.

Keith felt a rush of urgency fill him. He needed to leave the room. At least in the hallways he could hear the metallic groaning of the ship’s ancient body.

As the door opened with a gasp, Keith stepped out into the corridor. The floor felt cool against his bare feet, and the airyness of the pyjama bottom floating against his legs felt dazedly ticklish. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was walking, but he knew it was a ‘there’, and that was good as long as it wasn’t a ‘here’.

Keith wasn’t sure if it was surprising or not when his legs carried him back to the bridge. With the size of the window, it was the perfect viewing gallery for the cosmos, and it made Keith feel small in a way that was strangely reassuring. Like he was a single thread in a rich tapestry, and standing in front of the stars gave him a rare opportunity to see the full design.

He wasn’t sure either if it was surprising or not to find Lance already there when he arrived. The boy was curled into a small seat in front of the huge bay window, his legs folded in a jumble beneath him. He barely turned as Keith entered. His head bending a fraction to the side was the only indication that he’d noticed.

Lance was draped in loose fitting clothes. They looked worn but soft as they swathed his legs in pale folds of fabric. The gaping neck of the sleep shirt had slid off one of his shoulders, exposing the crest of one dark shoulder.

Keith padded quietly over to where he sat, slowly sinking down into the place next to him. It was as though he were stepping into a sacred space; the silent enormity of the galaxy was holy ground and Lance gazed out at it in respectful prayer. Keith didn’t want to disturb the sanctity of their union.

Even so, Lance let out a shuddering breath as Keith skimmed his personal space.

“No star maps tonight?” Keith murmured.

Lance inclined his head towards the window, “Got a pretty good one right here.”

Keith could agree with that. The twinkling of the stars bathed in the strange flux of colour from the surrounding nebula looked so impossibly beautiful that he wondered if it was even real at all or if was a dream thing that had simply brushed against his thoughts as it passed them. He looked at Lance and saw the boy’s eyes flitting from constellation to constellation. Keith wanted to know if he could name them all, or if there were too many to even conceive of titling.

“Do you think we can actually win this war?” Lance asked abruptly.

Keith tilted his body a little more to face him. Lance mirrored the action like he was magnetised, a push and a pull. Keith levelled him with a firm stare.

“Yes,” he said. “I really do.”

It was hard to say if Lance was pleased with the answer. His eyes sparkled with virgin hope but his jaw flexed with the bob of his Adam’s apple.

“Wonder what’s gonna happen after,” he mumbled.

Keith shrugged. Hope wasn’t a bad thing, but it was a hearty liquor that was fast to intoxicate. He was wary of looking too eagerly at the end and losing sight of the battles to come.

“I guess we try to get everyone home,” he said finally.

Lance looked away then, his eyes widening to try and take in the whole scope of stars in front of them.

“Home,” he echoed, and the gentle melancholic sound of it made Keith’s chest ache.

It reminded him of when Shiro had extended his patience and understanding and compassion. The idea that someone could readily give Keith something that so often he’d had stolen was a terrifying and brilliant notion. Lance’s brows pinched together in the exact same way now; Keith recognised this sort of fear when he saw it, and he could not quite bear to look at it.

Keith realised that he’d never once considered if Lance wanted to return to Earth. For the prisoners of war, they had been ripped from their planets and forced into servitude against their will. But it was different for Lance. He’d been torn from Earth, that was true, but he’d built a home with the Blade of Marmora, he’d pledged himself to a battle he’d been blissfully ignorant of. And he’d done so as a child.

It was hard to imagine there being an “after” to the war. Keith knew that he would most likely stay to help the universe restore itself. This was because part of him wanted to give people hope and help them through these hard times, but it was also because part of him understood that he could never truly feel complete without a mission. Earth had held opportunity for him to grow but space was a true chance to make a change. And impacting something positively was a self centered whim that Keith held onto stubbornly. He wanted a way to validate his own life, and if he could aid those in need it meant that he could make his own mark. That he could look back at the lives he’d touched and believe that yes, he was here, his actions had mattered.

As far as want could stretch, Keith didn’t think it was bad to want to matter. He wondered if there was really selfishness in war, and then he remembered that all wars were selfish; they cared nothing for the lives of others.

He looked again at Lance. There were a lot of people who deserved to go home, to be taken care of and to regain the healthy and happy lives they’d had before. Keith felt something tingle through his shoulder blades, all the way down to his arms, and he unconsciously bumped his shoulder against Lance’s. The boy didn’t tense this time. He leaned his shoulder back into Keith’s, and the pool of exposed skin shaved against Keith’s bare bicep. Keith shuddered. From this distance, he could make out a spattering of freckles over the slope of Lance’s shoulder. They held a random path, clustered together in whirls and trails, Lance’s very own constellations tinted beneath his skin.

“Will you go back to Earth?”

The question had been sitting squat on Keith’s tongue since Lance has uttered the word ‘home’. Keith hadn’t consciously asked, but he couldn’t help it. The quiet hour of morning was a pocket dimension only two breaths between night and day, and the hushed limbo was ever effective at dismantling the walls that separated guardedness and vulnerability. It was a place between poles where the two of them trod.

“I was thinking about it,” Lance answered after a moment.

Keith had been expecting him to brush past the question, but the close cradle of the atmosphere had lulled him from behind his shields, too.

“I’d miss a lot of people at the Blade. They’re family too, you know?”

Keith didn’t know, but he had once. Voltron had become a home for him, but his roots were embedded in Galran soil, and he had to know from which seed he’d grown so that he could understand what he would blossom into.

He replied, “Yeah, I get it.”

Lance nodded, but he didn’t look convinced. It took Keith several moments to understand that it wasn’t him Lance wasn’t convinced by. It was himself.

Lance had been telling himself that the Galra were his family for the past eight decaphoebes. If you could repeat a mantra enough times, you could be foolish enough to begin to believe it. But Lance had been repeating two opposing mantras, and so he had failed to convince himself of either. Instead, he had instilled himself with a healthy doubt for both. Because everyday Lance would eat with the Blade, train with the Blade, risk his life with the Blade. And every night, Lance would fold himself beneath his blankets and chant the names of his family back on Earth.

It was a tricky secret to unfold. Lance had twisted and flipped it into such tight origami that it barely resembled the truth anymore. But there was only so long you could hide the true nature of something. You could fold a universe worth of stars out of magazine clippings, but they would still be cheap paper, smudged and spat on with ink. Lance had folded his truth within the most compact corner of the galaxy, and it had taken the most random series of events to pick at it; a ragtag group of humans with a siphon of Galra DNA between them stumbling in between two stars. It was multi dimensional, and Keith had to turn it over repeatedly in his head to understand it. On paper, Lance was nothing like the Blades, in practice, he was everything like them. But in secret, he was so much closer to his own humanity than he could afford to admit.

"You're not like them," Keith said aloud.

"Neither are you," Lance said back.

It wasn't a criticism, and Lance's answer wasn't a retort. It was simply the truth, unpacked and naked. Lance wouldn't look at Keith, because doing so would mean confronting his confession. He didn't look like he was ready to admit his differences to himself. Years of tucking his thoughts safely away from his tongue had shaped Lance into a person he wasn't. Keith could see it in the starlight, the person Lance should have been. He could see every single time a protest had been squashed and Lance had cut off a little more of himself to fit into the mould he'd been presented with.

“Will you?”

Keith blinked, startled from his darkening thoughts. Lance was staring at him expectantly, eyebrows lifted at a slant.

“Will I what?”

“Go back to Earth,” Lance clarified.

Keith shook his head. “I don’t think there’s much left for me there.”

“You don’t have some boyfriend waiting for you back out there?”

Keith snorted. He realised too late that the action peeled his arm away from Lance’s.

“What is your obsession with asking if everyone has a boyfriend?”

Lance’s skin flushed dark so fast it was a miracle he didn’t pass out.

“Oh uh- Guess I wasn’t being too subtle.”

“I don’t think you even know what ‘subtle’ means,” Keith retorted.

He bumped his shoulder against Lance’s again. Banter was the perfect cover for his to act in camaraderie, when all he really wanted was to reestablish their physical contact. The second their skin brushed together, Lance let out a minute sigh.

“I was thinking about what you said. About liking guys as well as girls. Antok said you called it something back at the base.”

Keith thought to himself for a tick. “Yeah. Bisexual?”

“That’s what it is?” Lance chuckled. “Antok definitely said bisquick.”

Keith grinned, and it felt like the lightest thing he’d done since arriving on the bridge. “I’m pretty sure that’s a brand of pancake.”

“Oh my god, _pancakes,_ ” Lance gasped in pure reverence. “I forgot about those!”

“If you tell Hunk I bet he could make them for you,” Keith promised.

Lance’s posture melted like all his prayers had been answered. The sentiment rang through both of them; Keith was quite certain he’d kill a man to have a round of short stack drop scones with a sickly river of syrup.

“I think I might cry,” Lance whispered.

“Don’t,” Keith told him shortly. “People are sleeping, and you look like a wail-er.”

Lance inhaled a dramatic breath. Keith immediately shushed him.

“I _just_ said people were sleeping!”

Lance opened his mouth to argue, hesitated, and then shut it slowly, content to make his point by glaring daggers. Once he’d glared his fill, he turned back to the tapestry of stars that shot thin rays of light through the window.

“What are they like?”

“What? Pancakes.”

“Not pancakes, dumbass. Guys.”

Keith had a hard time tamping down his sneer. “You know what they’re like. Half the Blade are guys.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Lance snapped hurriedly. “I mean… I meant kissing. What’s it like kissing guys?”

Lance’s question was carefully neutral, not an ounce of any one emotion too heavy in his tone.

Keith turned to him as something hungry nipped at his heart. “Have you never been kissed before?”

Lance made a curious face as he gave a curious answer, “I have, but it was an alien girl. I’ve… Never kissed a human.”

He had velcroed his eyes onto a very specific patch of floor between his feet as he picked at the hem of his pyjama shirt. Keith breathed in shakily. He found Lance’s admission had synthesised his own curiosity - there was a question Keith hadn’t allowed himself to ask. Even now it sat somewhere behind his sternum, ripe for answering. Lance was an unfinished jigsaw, and Keith found himself desperate to be the exact shape of the missing piece. He wanted to know if they would fit together.

“It’s nice,” he murmured. “Kissing guys.”

It was the truth, and one that he wanted to share with Lance.

Lance slowly dragged his gaze up to meet Keith’s, his eyes glittering with the reflection of the stars. Keith turned his body to face him so they were fully tilted towards each other. Jigsaw meet piece.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Keith’s gaze hooked on the bob of Lance’s throat and how it looked like the cut of cardboard.

It was a very acute type of selfishness that made one want to be the first at something. It was a prize that you could only really give yourself, it couldn’t be swindled or bartered for or handed to you. It was something you had to reach out and grasp with both hands so that you could drag yourself towards it. But as Keith reach out his hand to hesitantly cradle Lance’s face, he found that he didn’t want this thing all to himself. It was something he wanted to share, to give as well as take. He was so very talented at fleeing from things that were offered, like kindness and praise and love, but it was different when he could give those things. It made it feel like any reciprocation had been earned.

So when Lance tilted his face to rest a little firmer in Keith’s palm he thought, _yes. I want this from you. I want you to have this from me, I’m giving it to you._

The first press of their lips registered as warmth and little else. Keith’s eyes slid closed and his other senses opened, letting him listen to how Lance shifted in his seat to better angle his head into the cup of Keith’s hand. The second press was firmer but not bolder. Everything about Lance was pulled as taut as a wire, and his fingers curled a chokehold in Keith’s shirt that threatened to tear the stitching. He inclined his head forward a notch too far and his front teeth clacked against Keith’s.

Keith gasped, his fingers around Lance’s jaw tightening just enough to hold him steady.

“Easy,” he breathed. “Like this.”

Keith held Lance’s face in place gently as he showed him how they could taste each other. The part of his lips was a suggestion, one that Lance accepted, understood, then attempted to mimic. Keith dipped the tip of his tongue to Lance’s lower lip, silently noting the way the other boy inhaled sharply and how his body trembled. His free hand moved to curve over the contour of Lance’s knee before sweeping up the long stretch of his leg. He distantly registered that the fabric of Lance’s pyjamas was exactly as soft as it had looked.

The noise Lance made in the back of his throat made something sharp and sweet arch up the back of Keith’s neck, and he couldn’t stop himself from sinking his teeth into the plump flesh of Lance’s bottom lip. That was all it took for Lance to grasp a hold of their trajectory. He released one of his bunched fists from Keith’s shirt to slip his hand up the hard plane of chest until it found a seat at the juncture between Keith’s neck and shoulder. He tilted his head to angle their mouths together better, the curve of their lips paralleling each other. Lance’s mouth was inquisitive and exploratory; he nipped at Keith’s lips, teased their tongues against one another, pressed their lips into one line as he leaned his weight into the solidness of Keith’s chest.

The noise that Lance made was so desperate that Keith was struck all at once by how lonely Lance must have found the Blade.

He had been nothing but tactile and chatty since arriving on the Castle of Lions. It was obvious now that what he couldn’t communicate verbally he compensated with touch. But that was a futile tactic when the Blade were not so outwardly affectionate. No wonder Lance was starving for kisses. He’d been denied love and nurturing for the better part of his childhood and teen years. There were so many firsts he’d been robbed of, and Keith wanted to make up the time for them all.

This drove him to slide his hand up to the angular curve of Lance’s hip and dip his thumb beneath the hem of the shirt. He rubbed a soothing circle into the tender skin there, feeling the heat and the pulse that sat beneath.

Lance pulled away so abruptly that Keith followed him for a second, his eyes blinking open blearily. Lance had recoiled with his whole body, putting a solid three feet between the two of them. Keith could see the problem in the round blue pools of Lance’s eyes:

He’d taken it too far.

Keith felt a bubble of shame explode in his gut instantly. In his haste to give Lance all the things he thought he’d deserved, he’d pushed a boundary that the other boy likely had barely had time to put up.

“Sorry,” Keith blurted quickly. “Lance, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have-”  
“It’s okay,” Lance interrupted. “It’s okay, it was just- uh…”

“Too much,” Keith completed for him. “It was too much. I’m sorry.”

It had a dual effect. To Lance, Keith could reassure him by demonstrating that he understood he’d overstepped a mark. But for himself, it was a chastisement.

“You okay?” Keith asked.

Really, he dreaded the answer. Lance still looked poised to bolt, and the image of it made Keith feel a simmering sort of sickness underneath his tongue.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Lance nodded. He sat up straight, taking the time to place his hands atop his legs. After a moment, he removed them to plant one either side of his hips and push himself to stand. He seemed to be looking everywhere but at Keith.

“I think I’m gonna go get some sleep,” he mumbled. “Like Shiro said, big mission coming up.”

Keith didn’t want Lance to leave, and Lance appeared reluctant to go. But they both seemed unsure of where to go now they’d parted. Keith knew now what Lance tasted like, how he sounded when Keith bit his lip. How Keith knew he was the first.

So Keith just nodded. “Goodnight, Lance.”

Lance dipped his head in return. He managed to pull one corner of his mouth into something resembling a smile.

“Night, Keith.”

Keith didn’t watch him go, but he knew by the telltale swish of the bridge doors when he was gone. Keith stared out again at the cosmos, alone below the canopy of stars. Between the blinking of their lights, Keith could see nothing but the smattering of freckles that coasted the skin of Lance’s shoulder. He didn’t know if it was because of the tiredness gradually leeching the strength from his eyes, or if the twilight hour had finally gotten to him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we go! Hopefully your questions about Lance have been answered. Now we've unlocked the tragic backstory, the real fun can begin ;)
> 
> As always, you can check out some drawings of this AU on [My Art Tumblr](https://dreamwips.tumblr.com/tagged/marmoran-au/)  
> , plus I've got some snippets of an AU zine that I plan to bring out in September. Stay tuned! <3

**Author's Note:**

> If you have any questions, hold on to them. Everything will get addressed!
> 
> In the mean time, check out some of the art work I did for this au on  
> [my art blog](https://dreamwips.tumblr.com/tagged/marmoran-au/)  
> 


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